PORSCHA FERMANIS
JohIn Keats DEAS OF THE E NLIGHTENMENT AND THE
John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment
John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment
Porscha Fermanis
Edinburgh University Press
© Porscha Fermanis, 2009 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Sabon by Norman Tilley Graphics Ltd, Northampton and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3780 5 (hardback) The right of Porscha Fermanis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: Keats, Enlightenment and Romanticism 1 Ancients and Moderns: Literary History and the ‘Grand March of Intellect’ in Keats’s Letters and the 1817 Poems
vi viii 1
17
2 Civil Society: Sentimental History and Enlightenment Socialisation in Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes 39 3 The Science of Man: Anthropological Speculation and Stadial Theory in Hyperion
65
4 Political Economy: Commerce, Civic Tradition and the Luxury Debate in Isabella and Lamia
97
5 Moral Philosophy: Sympathetic Identification, Utility and the Natural History of Religion in The Fall of Hyperion
121
Afterword: Ode to Psyche and Ode on a Grecian Urn
151
Notes
159
Bibliography
191
Index
207
Acknowledgements
This book began life as an examination of Keats’s reading of history and only later broadened in scope to include the ideas of the Enlightenment more generally. Its aim was always, however, not simply to rehabilitate Keats as a poet alive to the intellectual currents of his time, but also to contribute to our understanding of the relationship between the Romantic period and the Enlightenment, and hence, to what we mean by Romanticism itself, which has been so important a debate in Romantic circles in recent years. I would like to thank Fiona Stafford, John Barnard and David Womersely for their assistance and support with the first version of these ideas. Two bodies, the University College Oxford Old Members’ Trust Fund and the English Faculty, University of Oxford, provided scholarships and grants during this early stage. More recently, I received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences for another project, which nonetheless gave me with the time and space to complete this one. I owe much, of course, to other scholars of the eighteenth century and Romantic period. The debts are clear in the pages of this book, but I would like to mention expressly the work of Alan Bewell, James Chandler, Greg Kucich, Michael O’Neill, Nicholas Roe, Robert Ryan, Clifford Siskin and Daniel Watkins; and on eighteenth-century historiography, Karen O’Brien, Mark Salber Phillips and David Womersley. Further debts are owed to the staff of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; the British Library; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; Keats House, Hampstead; and the Public Records Office, London. At Edinburgh University Press I would like to thank Jackie Jones. To friends, colleagues and readers I would like to express my sincere thanks, in particular: Andrew Carpenter, Mark Crosby, Kelvin Everest, Robert Gerwarth, Clare Harding, Shelley Meagher, Jon Mee, Michelle O’Connell, Adrian Patterson, Seamus Perry, Stephen Wall and Nerys Williams. Finally, to
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my husband and family, please accept my gratitude for your continued encouragement and support. * * * A much shorter version of Chapter 3 of this book won the Keats–Shelley prize in 2005 and appeared as ‘Stadial Theory, Robertson’s History of America, and Hyperion’, Keats–Shelley Review, 19 (2005), 21–31. Chapter 4 was previously published in a slightly different form as ‘Isabella, Lamia, and “Merry old England”’, Essays in Criticism, 56.2 (2006), 139–62. All quotations from Keats’s letters are reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821: Volumes I–II, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 169–70, 184–5, 191–3, 199–200, 210, 224–5, 231–3, 238–9, 278–82, 396–8; 16, 19, 25, 74–5, 79–80, 100–4, 156, 192–4, 208, 212, 322–3, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, © 1958 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All quotations from Keats’s poems are reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger, 23, 42–4, 48–9, 84–5, 88–9, 92, 116, 118–19, 132–3, 186–7, 193–4, 230–1, 243, 248–52, 256–7, 260–1, 266–7, 274, 276, 282, 343–5, 354–8, 361–7, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, © 1978, 1982 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Line and page numbers appear in the text.
Abbreviations
HW The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1930–4). KC The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers, 1816–1878, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2nd edn, 2 vols (1948; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). LJK The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958). PJK The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970).
Introduction: Keats, Enlightenment and Romanticism
Reflecting on the virtues of ancient poetry in his Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763), Hugh Blair claims that ‘an extensive search’ would uncover ‘a certain degree of resemblance among all the most ancient poetic productions’ on the basis that ‘in a similar state of manners, similar objects and passions operating upon the imaginations of men, will stamp their productions with the same general character’. It is, of course, to one of the first ‘states’ or ‘stages’ of society that the poems of Ossian ostensibly belong, and although Blair goes on to argue that the ‘resembling features’ apparent in these early stages tend to dissipate in the face of subsequent revolutions and diversions, he nonetheless continues to see the operation of manners and poetry as mutually dependent throughout the various stages of society, even if the principal effect of a greater degree of refinement is to subdue the vigour and sublimity of the imagination as literature, like language, ‘advances from sterility to copiousness, and at the same time, from fervour and enthusiasm, to correctness and precision’.1 The idea of evolving states or stages of society was fundamental to eighteenth-century understandings of human progress, and Blair’s Dissertation is suggestive of the ways in which Enlightenment developmental models were transferred from historical and sociological writing to representations of literary history in the period. It also points to the continuities between historical and other types of literary writing.2 For Blair, as for many other Enlightenment thinkers, literary history was not something inherently different from more general historical studies: the evolution of a society was reflected in the development of its literature, and the history of the imagination was intimately connected to the history of social institutions as well as to theories about the progress of human understanding and moral judgement. David Hume saw the first histories of poetry, religion and society as virtually interchangeable in The Natural History of Religion (1757). Historians and social theorists from Blair to
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Condorcet argued that language, writing and conversation were the means by which knowledge and ethics were transmitted in increasingly cultivated societies; and Adam Smith famously identified the imagination as the basis of an historically progressive theory of human action and moral judgement in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).3 The euhemerist and evolutionary approach to the imagination that we find in so much Enlightenment thinking is reiterated in British Romanticera representations of literary history. In a review of Samuel Rogers in 1813, James Mackintosh follows Blair and other Scottish Enlightenment social theorists in arguing that ‘every conceivable modification of the state of a community, show themselves in the tone of its poetry’. William Hazlitt, in his introductory lecture to ‘Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth’ (1820), explains the unique genius of the Elizabethans in relation to the wider history of manners and opinion: the Elizabethans were ‘not at all sophisticated’ and their poetic representations therefore have the power of ‘truth and nature’ (HW, VI, 175). And Walter Scott claims in his 1824 ‘Essay on Romance’ for the Encyclopedia Britannica that the romances of chivalry were ‘modified according to manners and the state of society’, before going on to quote a passage from the preface to Robert Southey’s 1819 edition of Morte D’Arthur, which could itself have been taken from the pages of Kames, Smith or Blair: ‘in similar stages of civilization, or states of society, the fictions of different people will bear a corresponding resemblance, notwithstanding the difference of time and scene.’ 4 Despite the contested and highly politicised nature of Scottish, Irish and Welsh narratives of literary history, these allusions by Romantic-era writers and critics to the various states or stages of society indicate the extent to which Enlightenment models of history, and in particular the comparative model of the Scottish Enlightenment, continued to underpin projections of literary history in the early nineteenth century; and the situation was not fundamentally different with respect to fictional representation. Alan Bewell and, more recently, James Chandler have demonstrated that Wordsworth, Scott, Byron and Shelley all employed the anthropological framework of the Scottish Enlightenment and the sceptical agenda of the French Enlightenment as much as, and in some cases far more than, that of German Idealism or English sensibility; and a host of scholars before them have recognised the operation of comparative sociology and theories on the growth of laws in the work Scott, Galt and Hogg. To this list they might have added Southey, Godwin, Baillie, Peacock and, perhaps less obviously, John Keats, each of whom had a more positive and intellectually informed attitude towards the Enlightenment than that of straightforward hostility or opposition.5 This book seeks to contribute to the ongoing re-historicisation of
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Romantic-era attitudes towards the century that preceded them by investigating the complicated nature of the relationship between Keats’s poetry and the ideas of the Enlightenment. Another, related objective is to challenge some prevailing assumptions about Keats: namely, that his is a version of Romanticism lacking in intellectual content; that he was conspicuously and even selfconsciously literary in orientation; and that what few ideas he did have were either gleaned second-hand from Hunt and Hazlitt or, conversely, were natural, intuitive and innate. Enlightenment historiographical and anthropological models inform, for example, his understanding of the development of poetry as a series of historically situated and determined stages, most notably in his epistolary rendition of poetic evolution from Milton to Wordsworth and in his image of the ‘Mansion of Many Apartments’ (LJK, I, 278, 280), but also in his conjectural histories of the poet-figure in Endymion, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream. In each of these poems, the poet undergoes a complex development from nascent to cultivated reasoning and from selfish interiority to humanitarian sympathy employing the ‘methodological individualism’ common to many Enlightenment models of human progress. Unlike Wordsworth, Southey and Peacock, Keats does not habitually use ‘savage exempla’ or primitive models as ‘analogues’ to the poet-figure – in the development from nature to culture, his poet is more often on the side of culture – but the process of the transition from rudeness to refinement is nonetheless at the heart of much of his poetry, and the primary argument of this book is that Keats’s infamous and selfconscious narrative of his own poetic development exists alongside a much more pervasive Enlightenment trope of development in his work about the origins, ends and ‘science of man’.6 ‘Enlightenment’ is not a term often endorsed by literary scholars who, unlike historians, tend to favour ‘Augustan’, ‘neoclassical’ or, increasingly, simply ‘eighteenth-century’ as a way of detaching themselves from its apparently negative and reductive connotations.7 Like all labels that invest periodisation with aesthetic or intellectual qualities – like, indeed, ‘Romanticism’ itself – the term suffers from a certain imprecision. Once seen as the coordinated project of a small number of ‘great thinkers’, it is now more often depicted as ‘a site of political and cultural contestation’ or ‘as a series of problems and debates, of “flash-points”, characteristic of the eighteenth century’.8 John Pocock, Roy Porter and others have accordingly recommended the term ‘enlightenments’ rather than ‘the Enlightenment’, and the old focus on the French Enlightenment has been replaced by many types of enlightenments, most notably in England, Scotland, Wales, Germany and Italy, but also in some, admittedly limited, non-Western European contexts such as America and Russia.9
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John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment
To view the Enlightenment in this way is to resist seeing it as geographically and intellectually monolithic, but accompanying revisionary understandings of the term as enquiry rather than doctrine, or attitude rather than period, is the fear that it ‘might have become increasingly obscure or even meaningless’.10 As Porter has pointed out, even within regional or national contexts, the Enlightenment can encompass very different intellectual and political positions, from arguments in favour of religious freedom by politically conservative figures to political radicalism within a dissenting or established Christian tradition.11 The French Enlightenment has come to be seen as ‘less a body of doctrine than a number of shared premises from which men of different temperaments, placed in different situations, drew quite radically different conclusions’, while the English Enlightenment has been described as ‘the ideology of particular articulate elites with defined interests’.12 Debates about who or what constitutes the Counter-Enlightenment have only further complicated the picture.13 More recently, the transnational turn in historiography has even begun to question whether nation-centric paradigms can adequately explain the Enlightenment’s international and cosmopolitan aspects. Without suggesting that the Enlightenment is a universal or coordinated project, John Robertson has convincingly argued that focusing on difference is unhelpful and ‘obscures more than it reveals’.14 The version of the Enlightenment that is habitually opposed to Romanticism is, however, one that shares few of the pluralistic features of these recent historiographical debates. Either Romantic scholars see the Enlightenment as one of the causes of the French revolution or they tend to limit it ‘to a series of derogatory clichés’, encompassing such attributes as a blind faith in progress and the permanency of historical improvement; a belief in the irresistible power of human reason to change society; an entrenched scepticism towards religion and other forms of belief, in particular institutionalised Christianity; a dualistic empiricism that separates subject and object, and proposes mechanical understandings of the human mind; and an assumption that history is reducible to ‘universal’ histories or ‘meta-narratives’, with some commentators even going so far as to argue that the Enlightenment provided the foundation for Western imperialism and totalitarianism.15 It is not difficult to see why Keats’s disparagement of ‘consequitive reasoning’, Shelley’s ambiguous reflections on utility, Wordsworth’s ‘meddling intellect’ and Coleridge’s ‘philosophy of mechanism’ are commonly portrayed as a rejection of this kind of Enlightenment. Robert Darnton’s work on the French Enlightenment has, however, shown us that mesmerism and other ‘irrational’ ideas were just as common in the eighteenth century, and that studies of the Enlightenment should not be
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confined to an elite group of great thinkers.16 David Spadafora has demonstrated that, in Britain at least, a belief in progress was neither as customary nor as comprehensive as has been previously assumed; and he and Porter have established the extent to which religious belief persisted among Scottish and English Enlightenment thinkers from Robertson to Priestley.17 William Walker has convincingly challenged the validity of the ‘dualistic empiricist terminology against which Romanticism frequently defines itself’ and has reminded us that Lockean empiricism does not entail a simple disjunction between subject and object, and active and passive forms of understanding.18 And Karen O’Brien has argued that a number of English, Scottish and American Enlightenment histories do not bear out ‘the triumph of an Enlightenment meta-narrative of progress’ or base their arguments ‘in a universal, unchanging logic or nature or spirit as all metanarratives are said to do.’ 19 O’Brien and others instead see in the writing of the period a selfconscious and even sentimental approach to narrative that questions the assumption that irony is the only or primary register of the Enlightenment. David Womersley has traced in the work of Robertson and Gibbon a movement away from a pedagogic idiom towards a style marked by imaginative sympathy and a greater willingness to admit the wonderful and the improbable; and Mark Salber Phillips has demonstrated that the social and sentimental themes that came to dominate representation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were not entirely new. The commercial endeavours that in part produced the supposed break in historical and literary writing in the late eighteenth century had already been present in British society for more than a generation; and the course of change was no more abrupt in relation to sentimental themes.20 The work of O’Brien and Phillips indicates the extent to which historians and scholars of historiography after Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973) have drawn on literary techniques such as rhetorical analysis and close reading in order to demonstrate that Enlightenment thinkers were not doctrinaire or consistent in their attitudes: theoretical assumptions were modified by minute and exotic details; stadial theory was made subservient to the demands of narrative; character portraits conceded the efficacy of sentimental tones and registers; and philosophic, encyclopedic and taxonomic structures gave way to organic narratives.21 If, however, historians and historiographers have employed literary practices in order to problematise long-standing views of the Enlightenment, literary scholars have been slower to return the favour. O’Brien and Womersley have given centre-stage to the close relationship between literary and historical writing in the eighteenth century, and nuanced historiographical debates have certainly re-emerged in the work of the best Romantic
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John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment
theoreticians, such as James Chandler and Clifford Siskin, but Romantic scholars involved in more empirical or interpretive studies have been less inclined to reassess assumptions about the Enlightenment. Recent challenges to periodicity, especially in relation to Scottish and Irish Romanticism, and the now widespread acceptance of continuity theses, have done much in theory to diminish the idea of Romanticism as a comprehensive rejection of eighteenth-century understandings of history, literature and culture; and, more generally, of reason, science, system and theory.22 In practice, however, the tenacity of Romantic paradigms of transcendence and escapism, and the residual effect of their underlying ‘to and from’ approach, have left many of the old critical assumptions in place.23 Literary scholars may no longer argue that 1790 marks a sudden rupture in the style and representative techniques of British writers, but the Romantic period can still be represented as the locus of a corrective shift towards subjectivity, transcendence and feeling.24 Romanticism, in these accounts, is most often ‘celebrated as a remedy or … blamed as a reaction’. At best, it is the Enlightenment’s more fulfilling ‘summation’.25 This book interrogates the (at least partly self-generated) idea that Romanticism is an improvement or correction to facile and reductive Enlightenment understandings. As Marshall Brown has pointed out, the Romantics’ distaste for systematic and speculative thought is all too often taken at face value and should instead be thought of as only the surface or theatrical manifestation of a deeper process of reflection ‘that was the Romantic working-through of its roots’.26 Brown’s argument is suggestive of the idea that Romanticism and Enlightenment share a common set of intellectual and aesthetic values, but it also registers the way in which Romantic-era self-representation has influenced our own critical heritage and in particular our attitudes towards the Enlightenment. Siskin has rightly argued that Romantic scholars have tended to repeat ‘the Romantic under the guise of interpreting it’ and much Romantic scholarship has therefore focused ‘on the professional problem of how to write about Romanticism without being Romantic’. Jerome McGann, too, has pointed out that both Romantic writing and its scholarship ‘are dominated … by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own selfrepresentations’. Even the relatively recent historicising trend in literary scholarship has not fully resolved the problem: ‘it is precisely by our work of situating Romantic writings historically that we share their blindness, their ideology’.27 The question of the transfer and transmission of ideas from one group of thinkers and writers to another is an exceptionally difficult one, but following Romantic-era self-representation, transfer in Romantic critical
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practice is typically figured in negative terms as revision or rejection. One means of resolving this problem is to see self-representation as only one of a variety of ways of understanding early nineteenth-century attitudes towards their recent past. It is not just that the Enlightenment is an independent intellectual and historical movement in its own right or even that it resists categorisation in clichéd or monolithic terms, but also that its ideas inform more Romantic-era representation than explicit authorial statements suggest. The need both to recover and to resist Romantic writers’ own reactions to the Enlightenment, therefore, requires a simultaneously historical and historically-critical approach, one that is able to uncover Romantic-era critical practices without necessarily repeating them and does not by default define transfer as rejection.28 If Keats dismisses Godwinian rationalism and what he calls ‘consequitive reasoning’, his attitude towards other Enlightenment intellectual frameworks is far more ambivalent. In Hyperion, for example, he participates in stadial debates about the American Indians, and although he undermines the moral implications of his own argument by offering a more nuanced and sympathetic rendition of historical development, the sentimentalism that competes in the poem with stadial theory echoes a similar disjunction in a number of Enlightenment histories such as William Robertston’s popular History of America (1777). In suggesting that Keats had a more informed and positive relationship with the Enlightenment than is usually or generally attributed to him, I do not, of course, wish to argue that he unthinkingly accepts Enlightenment models, frameworks and ideas in all of his poems and letters. As Stuart Sperry has rightly pointed out, ‘rarely, if ever, did he accept ready-made the ideas of others; such influence as they exerted on him was almost invariably modified by his habit of independent thinking’.29 Keats’s poems are certainly not reducible to versions of various Enlightenment developmental narratives about the science of man, and they at times complicate, contradict and even prevent readings in these terms. Moreover, he frequently adapts acquired or established modes of understanding and struggles, as Womersley remarks of Gibbon, ‘to extend the adequacy of his historical imagination’.30 Nor do I wish to deny that the century ended with a greater emphasis on sentiment, the individual and the private sphere. Clearly, there was a gradual shift in the eighteenth century towards sentiment and sensibility, but part of the aim of this book is to demonstrate the extent to which apparently redundant Enlightenment models of representation persisted in the early nineteenth century and therefore continued to shape Romantic-era literary writing. The consensus among historians that changes to literary and historical writing around 1750–90 are best seen as a process of self-transformation from within the Enlighten-
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John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment
ment itself has yet to have its full impact on Romantic scholarship. That impact, as Murray Pittock has pointed out in his timely and valuable defence of Romantic periodicity, must be more than the relabelling of the ‘late Enlightenment’ as ‘pre-Romantic’ or pre-Romantic as ‘early Romantic’, and must instead enable a new sense of what constitutes the Romantic period: The strong presence of certain features which make their appearance in cultural developments found between 1750 and 1780 … will be taken as providing the range of possibilities, the choice of cultural options, which their own and succeeding generations could neglect, but which had been simply unavailable earlier. Periodicity is thus defined as what is available for writers to choose, not by what they did choose.31
Drawing on this and other newly revised notions of periodicity by Brown, Chandler and Siskin, I wish to question the idea that Keats’s approach to the Enlightenment is best defined as ‘competing’ or ‘revisionary’.32 Put simply, my argument is not only that circulating Enlightenment ideas on man, society and religion retain epistemological weight in his poetry and in the Romantic period more generally, but also that the humanism, sympathy and sentimentalism that emerge in his work frequently have their source in his reading of Enlightenment texts or in circulating Enlightenment ideas on moral judgement and human understanding. Many of Keats’s most urgent intellectual and aesthetic concerns are therefore the product of shared and unresolved disputes originating in the work of Enlightenment thinkers themselves. To approach Keats’s poetry in this way is to confront some of the standard assumptions of conventional scholarship on his work. Even a cursory glance at his reception history reveals that in his case supposedly redundant assumptions about Romantic escapism have retained much of their critical sting. In 1965 Walter Evert claimed that ‘[d]uring the past half-century it has become increasingly respectable to discuss Keats as a thinker – or at least it has not seemed patently absurd to do so’, but Evert’s optimism now seems premature.33 In the 1960s, there was still strong critical resistance to the idea of Keats as a thinker and even more to the suggestion that he had any intellectual links with the Enlightenment: his primary ties were with the Elizabethans and were ‘mainly literary’.34 In 1963, Walter Jackson Bate argued in his biography of Keats that ‘[w]hat he read from four to eighteen is relevant for understanding the later life of any writer; and it becomes more so if the life is short’ without referring to Keats’s early reading of Mavor, Robertson and Voltaire; while Sperry, writing on Keats’s scepticism and Voltaire in 1965, concluded his otherwise enormously insightful article with the cautious statement that
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‘Keats’s skepticism is too broad and fundamental, his reading in such writers too scattered and fragmentary, to permit conclusions that are more than tentative’. Sperry acknowledges that Keats ‘shares certain important intellectual affinities with the Enlightenment’, but rarely goes beyond an admission that ‘[t]here is some indication that the poet’s reading in Voltaire’s histories was important in the development of his historical sense’.35 One reason for this scholarly equivocation is undoubtedly a persistent problem identified by Nicholas Roe as ‘the idea of his [Keats’s] minimal worldly presence’, which ‘was accepted throughout the nineteenth century and has continued to influence critical approaches to Keats and his poems for the greater part of the twentieth’. In order to save Keats from Hunt and the ‘Cockney School’, his friends and Victorian critics sought to depoliticise him; and with help from Shelley’s Adonais, they established the myth of his youthful, ignorant otherworldliness.36 Keats was thereby the victim not of the common complaints of neglect or erasure from Romantic period literary history, but perhaps more invidiously, of an alternative set of problems associated with apologetic and misguided appreciation. It was not until the 1980s that there was a major reassessment of his work. Drawing on pioneering ‘New Historicist’ scholarship by Marilyn Butler, McGann and others, this type of criticism demonstrated both the inadequacy of exclusively generic, thematic and formal approaches to Keats’s poetry, and the relevance of a surprising variety of political, ideological and historical contexts.37 Intellectual history has, however, been less central to the New Historicist project, at least in its Romantic guise. A Romanticism that emphasises visionary transcendence over historical particularity necessarily privileges metaphysical ideas over historiographical and sociological ones, but a Romanticism that seeks to restore class, gender and national inflections inevitably focuses more on ideology than on ideas. Scholarship falling under the label of ‘Romanticism and History’ has therefore tended to emphasise either the ‘peculiar eventfulness’ of the period 1790–1840 or the material conditions surrounding Romantic acts of literary production, a practice that Paul H. Fry has amusingly described as that of ‘arranging a few beads like Peterloo, Pentridge, the Holy Alliance, and the arrest of Major Cartwright along the string of class conflict and calling it history’.38 Historiography and the history of ideas has been relatively neglected, and critics have usually elided altogether the idea of ‘historical epistemology’ or what Chandler has called the ‘conditions of intelligibility’ for the ‘discursive practices’ of Romantic writers themselves.39 In relation to Keats, there is still a predisposition among some critics
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John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment
to reduce his ‘ideological experience’ to ‘mistaken aesthetics’ so that his achievement in the so-called ‘great’ poems becomes his evasion of political, social and historical concerns.40 However historically grounded in theory, escapism is at the heart of McGann’s work on Keats. He suggests, for example, that in To Autumn Keats ‘showed how poetry could establish “a world elsewhere”. In that alternative geography, personal and social tensions could be viewed with greater honesty and intellectual rigour.’ 41 Daniel Watkins, too, has drawn on Christopher Caudwell’s argument that Keats’s poetry constructs ‘a world of romance, beauty and sensuous life’ in order to show that ‘in its very escapist longings it articulates remarkably clearly the social relations and social contradictions with which Keats’s imagination contended’. Watkins and other materialist critics have tended to work against the grain of Keats’s poems, either by focusing on their ‘unsaid’ or ‘unconscious’ or by subjugating their meaning to the more encompassing historical processes that produced them. Conversely, psychological and socio-stylistic approaches have consistently reduced his poetry to an expression of his own ‘mental topography’ and, more often than not, social and cultural anxieties.42 It is true that Keats frequently represents his development as the ‘very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers’ (LJK, I, 214) and that he often enacts an unstable and even anxiety-ridden ‘sense of staged process’ in his poems and letters; but critics have paid a misleading amount of attention to the narrative of his own poetic development rather than to the ways in which his poetry enacts and depends on competing historical and cultural ideas as well as upon the various modes and forms of representation that attend them.43 Few scholars have attempted to situate his poems within an intellectual and historiographical context that focuses on changing standards of representation. Even fewer have endeavoured to historicise his work from within the specific context of his reading of history, philosophy and social theory; that is, from within the discursive practices that emanate from his own reading of the texts that set the agenda for the intellectual debates of his time. The nature of Keats’s reception has increasingly come at a cost both to his place in a wider Romantic culture – in relation to which he tends to be seen as the unworldly counterpart to more culturally competent and commercially successful figures such as Byron, Scott and Moore – and to understandings of his poems, which are still frequently read as escapist alternatives to an unsatisfactory political, cultural and social reality. In spite of the revisionist intent of Keats criticism in the last thirty years and the publication of works such as Hermione de Almeida’s edited collection Critical Essays on John Keats (1990) and other notable exceptions which assert ‘the intellectual life and philosophical tenor’ of his poetry, the
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assumption remains that his knowledge of ‘serious’ works of history, philosophy and political economy is at best fragmentary, speculative and unsophisticated, and at worst virtually nonexistent.44 As de Almeida puts it, ‘a certain view of Keats persists: he was, if not ill-educated but for a few trade skills in bloodletting and toothpulling, then self-educated on a few books lent to him by his friends’.45 Keats’s self-deprecating humour – ‘I know nothing I have read nothing’ (LJK, I, 271) – and his distrust of ‘consequitive reasoning’ may raise doubts as to whether he employed formal or conventional intellectual frameworks, but his aversion to the rationalism of consequitive reasoning was not a conflict between ‘reason and unreason’.46 Nor was his selfdeclared preference for ‘sensations’ over ‘thoughts’ a simple contest between ‘intuition’ and ‘philosophy’, or ‘sensation’ and ‘reflection’ (LJK, I, 185), as scholarship outlining the central place of the sensations in eighteenth-century moral philosophy and Kantian noumenal metaphysics has emphatically demonstrated.47 In spite of his occasional antiintellectualism and his tendency to reject the kind of poetry that amounts to a ‘sketchy intellectual Landscape’ rather than ‘a search after Truth’ (LJK, I, 174), Keats does not dismiss the value of philosophy, knowledge and book-learning. He notes in a letter to Benjamin Bailey of 22 November 1817 that he has ‘not one Idea of the truth of any of my speculations’, but the fact that he does not claim to have a ‘mental Cottage of feelings quiet and pleasant’ with an attendant ‘Philosophical Back Garden’ is not to say that his ideas on philosophy are nothing more than guesswork and intuition (LJK, I, 254).48 Whatever Keats’s ‘natural’ or ‘native’ tendencies, the epistemological, metaphysical and historiographical structures that underpin his work were informed by careful and systematic reading over a number of years: ‘I am reading Voltaire and Gibbon, although I wrote to Reynolds the other day to prove reading of no use … I hear Hazlitt’s Lectures regularly—’ (LJK, I, 237). His self-doubt and intellectual misgivings should not lead us to conclude, on the one hand, that he was an amateurish devotee of Hazlitt or, on the other, that his knowledge was somehow intuitive, innate or even self-taught; and to argue that his medical training somehow disadvantaged his intellectual and political development is to reinforce the snobbery of Blackwood’s attacks on the ‘Cockney School’.49 Charles Cowden Clarke’s Recollections of Writers (1878), Charles Armitage Brown’s record of the books in Keats’s library at his death and Keats’s own letters attest to his steady diet of reading over a prolonged period of time. He read a range of works, including ancient historians and philosophers such as Cicero, Livy and Xenophon, and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historians such as Holinshed, Raleigh and Burnet; but as Greg Kucich reminds us, the
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texts to which he frequently returned during 1817–19 were those of Enlightenment historians, philosophers and social theorists: Voltaire, Gibbon, Robertson and Mavor.50 * * * The nature of Keats’s knowledge of Enlightenment history, philosophy and social theory is an essential methodological question for this book and one that is not confined to the relatively simple task of ascertaining which works he read or owned: some ideas circulate among coteries and acquaintances; others are commonplaces of the period, while still others are perpetuated in newspapers, reviews and journals. It is both possible and feasible to outline a list of ideas or books to which Keats was in all likelihood exposed by virtue of his social position and coterie, from Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments to Warton’s History of English Poetry (1774–81). But if it is comparatively straightforward to establish these texts, it is much more difficult to argue that he read them in any detail or that he engaged with their ideas in a meaningful sense. Short of an overt or direct reference, it is equally difficult to demonstrate that a particular text is the source of an idea within a poem or letter, or that the relationship between Keats and another writer is one of influence. The concept of ‘influence’ has, moreover, lost some credibility among historians and literary critics in recent years. As Spadafora has reminded us, on the one hand, an influence can be significant without being overt or explicit; on the other, influence is by no means the only available intellectual tool to hand. Circulating ideas, intellectual currents and various kinds of political unconscious can mould epistemological structures and provide a series of critical foci or contexts for a writer’s work.51 Methodologically, this book is more a study of ‘intellectual contexts’ than of influence, but in seeking a balance between the (relative) certainty of source material and the complicated ambiguity of contextual material it primarily focuses on those texts that Keats read or owned without always seeking to define them as source material. Even if, at times, I can only elucidate the kinds of intellectual contexts to which he was exposed or with which he demonstrates a certain affinity or homology of argument, I nonetheless hope to achieve new purchase on many of his poems. This book does not, therefore, provide a schematic, definitive or comprehensive overview of the Enlightenment, being driven instead by the more limited perspective of Keats’s own reading, and by the historiographical and intellectual imperatives raised by his work; hence, its focus on literary history, feudalism, civil society, anthropological speculation, theories of political economy and civic virtue, moral philosophy, religion
Introduction
13
and empiricism. Following Keats’s reading of Voltaire, Robertson and Gibbon, it is more concerned with what Porter has called the ‘late’ or ‘second’ Enlightenment, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, than with the ‘early’, ‘first’ or ‘pre-’Enlightenment, although Keats was familiar with works by Locke and Bacon.52 In relation to the scope of its source material and contexts, it concentrates on the English and Scottish Enlightenments because of Keats’s own reading and intellectual interests. Alternative Enlightenments do not, therefore, figure as prominently as they might for other Romantic-era writers such as Godwin or Coleridge, but Keats read works by Voltaire and Rousseau, and aspects of the French Enlightenment (particularly scepticism, deism and anthropological speculation) fall within its scope. Following both Keats’s reading and gaps in critical scholarship, I am primarily concerned with ideas, debates and disciplines rooted in social and political life; in other words, with what we now call the ‘social sciences’, such as economics, history, political theory, sociology and anthropology, although ‘moral philosophy’ is perhaps a more historically accurate term than social sciences.53 Robert Ryan’s full-length study of Keats’s religious sense and de Almeida’s edited collection of essays make significant contributions to the fields of religion and metaphysics, respectively, and I consider these areas only to the extent that I can contribute something new. Similarly, I do not examine in any detail Keats’s use of classical mythology, which in its syncretic and euhemerist approach is clearly indebted to Enlightenment traditions, on the basis that it has received comprehensive coverage in the work of Evert and E. B. Hungerford.54 In spite of the range and diversity of its meaning, the term Enlightenment remains a useful intellectual tool for the purposes of this book for the following reasons. First, it encompasses varied and disparate interests in what we might broadly call the science of man, interests that are manifested in historical and philosophical models from ‘stadial’, ‘conjectural’ and ‘philosophic’ history to religious, empirical, sceptical and moral philosophy. It also, however, suggests a ‘common descriptive model’ for the history of the European states as they developed from primitive, medieval and feudal societies to commercial social systems; and it thereby draws together a cluster of ideas engaged with the notion that change is necessary and inevitable, if not always beneficial.55 Finally, in the absence of agreement as to its geographical scope and intellectual agenda, it is, at the very least, a common ‘language’ or ‘problematic, a certain way of asking questions’.56 The term is not, therefore, used primarily as a general period-marker for the eighteenth century, but refers instead to a set of intellectual sensibilities concerned with the development of the human
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race, which for the sake of clarity we can call ‘Enlightenment’.57 The book primarily concentrates on Keats’s narrative poems. Close readings of Endymion, The Eve of St. Agnes, Hyperion, Isabella, Lamia and The Fall of Hyperion are at its core, but it also examines some of Keats’s letters and early lyrics. It does not extend its consideration to Keats’s odes in any detail on the basis that they have received a disproportionate amount of attention from other scholars. Moreover, as Marjorie Levinson has noted, the odes tend to ‘thematise’ ideas rather than enact them, and any study that wishes to show how circulating ideas are transmitted and find expression in Keats’s poetry will inevitably find more fruitful examples in the extended nature of the narrative poems.58 That said, some of the odes are undoubtedly consistent with the ideas of this book and I gesture towards the ways in which Ode to Psyche and Ode on a Grecian Urn employs Enlightenment intellectual frameworks in a brief afterword. My approach to the selected poems and letters is more thematic than chronological, and apart from the transition from the republicanism of the 1817 Poems to the humanism of Endymion, I do not argue for a sense of gradual development or progress in Keats’s poems; that is, from the ‘bad’ early poems to the ‘great’ late poems or from apparently reductive Enlightenment understandings of history, society and culture to more sophisticated Romantic ones. Moreover, the ‘ideas’ of the book’s title are not presented as background material, but are rather illuminated by and through Keats’s own writing. Despite recent and much needed criticism of a ‘tradition of Romantic literary scholarship that has theorized on aesthetics only and the self-generating impetus of “readings”’, this book is committed to showing how readings of poems are not mutually exclusive to work on historical and intellectual contexts.59 Enlightenment ideas can provide us with a series of new contexts or critical foci with which to read Keats’s poems, but they are also transmitted and find expression in those poems on a thematic, formal and stylistic level. Keats’s knowledge of Enlightenment texts is, therefore, a significant interpretive resource for a full understanding of his work and this book is a deliberate return to the practice of ‘reading’ poems. I begin by considering the various models of literary and more general history projected in Keats’s letters before going on to examine representations of literary history in Sleep and Poetry and I stood tip-toe upon a little hill. I argue against interpretations of these early poems which see them as conflicted psychological reactions to the ‘burden of the past’, offering instead alternative analyses which focus less on the ahistorical concept of individual genius than on Keats’s awareness of competing conceptions of literary history as linear, cyclical or stadial, and on
Introduction
15
Enlightenment understandings of the connections between the history of literature and the wider history of manners and opinion. Chapter 2 centres on Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes, arguing that despite Keats’s explicit rejection of an external ‘history of action’ and other gestures towards emerging ‘internal’ representative techniques such as historical evocation and sentimentalism, the poems continue to employ broader Enlightenment sociological models depicting the transition from rudeness to refinement and from feudal to civil society. In Chapter 3 I turn to Hyperion, arguing that it is informed by the Enlightenment anthropological tropes of the primitive encounter and stadial theory, while at the same time mirroring the complex nature of Enlightenment histories in its overwhelming sympathy for the Titans and its use of tragic and sentimental modes of representation in describing their downfall. Chapter 4 considers the increasing resistance to the Enlightenment ‘cult of commerce’ from within the early nineteenthcentury dissenting press, focusing on Leigh Hunt’s Examiner. Isabella and Lamia make important contributions to debates on commercialisation and luxury by drawing on characteristic representations of industrial labour by political writers of the period as well as on republican and neoHarringtonian political models that explain the growth or failure of liberty in terms of socio-political health. Finally, Chapter 5 examines the relationship between Keats’s representation of the poet-figure and theories of moral philosophy in The Fall of Hyperion, arguing that Keats projects in the poem a trajectory of human development from a primitive understanding rooted in fanaticism and superstition to a more cultivated understanding, which is based on a sympathetic theory of moral judgement. While I sometimes interrogate the exclusivity of certain approaches to Keats’s poetry – psychological, textual, materialist – my own analyses are not intended to be read in isolation, but rather to complement and extend readings which take alternative critical positions. Similarly, a discussion that focuses on the Enlightenment will inevitably exclude some aspects of Keats’s intellectual life, and this book hopes to supplement existing scholarship that rightly emphasises the importance of other ideas and contexts such as his medical training and republicanism. My purpose is not, therefore, to exclude other influences on Keats’s poetry, but rather to demonstrate the ways in which already established sources or intellectual frameworks can coexist with alternative ones. Keats’s scepticism and empiricism, for example, emerge as much from his reading of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique (1764) as they do from his medical training. Nonetheless, I argue for the central place of Enlightenment thinking in Keats’s poetry and more generally for the Romantic period’s historical and cultural self-understanding. The selected poems demonstrate that he had
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real intellectual affinities with the ideas of the Enlightenment and with that period’s complicated and often innovative ways of conceptualising the science of man. The ways in which these ideas assist, influence, shape and challenge his poetic agenda are the subject matter of this book.
Chapter 1
Ancients and Moderns: Literary History and the ‘Grand March of Intellect’ in Keats’s Letters and the 1817 Poems By the close of the eighteenth century, the historiographical dispute concerning the ancients and the moderns had in many areas resolved itself in favour of the moderns, and doctrines of continuous or progressive degeneration across the arts and sciences were increasingly rare as the century advanced.1 William Mavor’s Universal History, Ancient and Modern (1802), which Keats read while still at school, endorses the widely held view that warfare and government had improved with the passage of time and that modern monarchies were preferable to ancient ones (I, 20–3, 47–8, 101–2).2 With respect to learning and technology too, Mavor has no doubt that the moderns have outshone their predecessors. The visibility of progress in the practical arts leads him to conclude that advances in commerce and technology have improved standards of living, and promoted peace and a ‘milder spirit of policy’ in modern times (I, 43, 99–104, 105). In relation to the fine arts, however, he asserts that architecture, sculpture, history and some forms of poetry have declined from their ancient perfection, claiming that ‘[i]n most of the fine arts the Greeks are, to this day, unrivalled’ (I, 42).3 Ancient epic and dramatic poetry in particular receive high praise from Mavor, who maintains that even the Romans were incapable of reaching Greek standards (I, 67). English poetry, on the other hand, was sometimes seen as an exception to this general decline in poetic vitality and achievement. In his Lives of the English Poets (1779–81) Samuel Johnson argues that ‘[f]rom the time of Gower and Chaucer the English writers have studied elegance, and advanced their language, by successive improvements’, culminating in the unsurpassed standard of Dryden and Pope; and Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry seeks to demonstrate ‘the progress of our national poetry, from a rude origin and obscure beginnings, to its perfection in a polished age’.4 Johnson and Warton have a similar professed agenda couched in suitably sociological terms – namely, to demonstrate the steady advance of English poetry from primitive rudeness to elegant refinement –
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but the latter’s account of literary development is far more ambiguous than his introductory remarks suggest. As David Fairer has pointed out, the History’s ostensibly progressive narrative is, in fact, undermined by a number of ‘counter-movements’: in the first instance, Warton promotes both classical and gothic styles, and in often preferring the latter, claims for it an alternative and unique set of literary standards; in the second instance, he repeatedly and increasingly deflates the term refinement by associating it with the trivality and licentiousness of the Restoration court.5 By volume three, he explicitly argues that the artificial productions of modern refinement have sacrificed the vivid immediacy of the native English literature of less polished times.6 Romantic-era literary historians tended to be even less sanguine than Warton in their view of the development of English poetry. Hazlitt’s lectures, delivered early in 1818 and published as Lectures on the English Poets (1818), consider the evolution of English poetry from (relatively) ancient to modern times, but are far from unequivocally progressive in their attitude and tone, instead promoting the revival of an ‘old school’ of poetry represented by Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare. Hazlitt attacks the idea of progress in the arts even more directly in his 1814 essay ‘Why the Arts are not Progressive: A Fragment’, arguing that the idea of ‘regular advances … to higher degrees of excellence’ does not apply to the arts in the same way that it does to other fields. What is ‘mechanical, reducible to rule, or capable of demonstration’ can be progressive and gradually improve, but that which depends on genius, taste and feeling can stagnate or even decline.7 Moreover, the situation cannot be remedied by studying or imitating the ancients as progress in the arts requires an original impulse or ‘genius’ connected to an immediate communication with nature rather than the formation of public institutions or the distribution of prizes (HW, IV, 160, 162–3).8 The difference between ancient and modern temperaments in the fine arts was, therefore, a still contentious issue in the early nineteenth century and it remained a powerful critical tool in Romantic-era literary historiography. Increasingly redefined or resituated as a specifically English (or sometimes British) debate between the ‘old school’ of poetry and the moderns, it provided the opportunity for a longer and more sociologicallydriven perspective on the movements of literary history. Keats, for example, frequently follows Hazlitt in recasting the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns as a dispute between the Elizabethans and his contemporaries.9 In a letter to John Hamilton Reynolds of 3 February 1818, he compares the ‘moderns’ (by whom he means Wordsworth, Hunt and other contemporary poets) to the ‘antients’ (with whom he seems to conflate or associate the Elizabethans):
Ancients and Moderns
19
Modern poets differ from the Elizabethans in this. Each of the moderns like an Elector of Hanover governs his petty state, & knows how many straws are swept daily from the Causeways in all his dominions & has a continual itching that all the Housewives should have their coppers well scoured: the antients were Emperors of vast Provinces, they had only heard of the remote ones and scarcely cared to visit them.—I will cut all this—I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular … —I don’t mean to deny Wordsworth’s grandeur & Hunt’s merit, but I mean to say we need not be teazed with grandeur & merit—when we can have them uncontaminated & unobtrusive. (LJK, I, 224–5)
Keats uses the imagery of modern statehood and civil society in order to represent the ‘disciplined technicality’ of contemporary poetry while associating the Elizabethan style with a more benevolent, if impersonal, authoritarianism.10 The mutual decline of poetry and landscape is a frequent trope in his letters, and the spatial magnitude associated with the vast and uncontaminated provinces of the ancients is evident in the natural grandeur of Elizabethan poetry. Conversely, the petty squabbling and egotism of the moderns conflicts with his idea of ‘negative capability’ and finds expression in a contemporary urban landscape of causeways, dominions and other artificial subdivisions.11 The spatial and topographical implications of this elector/emperor paradigm are hinted at in an earlier letter about Endymion to Benjamin Bailey of 8 October 1817, in which Keats again expresses his desire for a poetic landscape large enough in which to wander and cultivate images ‘so numerous that many are forgotten’. Invention, fancy and imagination are privileged over the neoclassical standards of correctness, decorum and convention as the main elements in the voyage of poetic conception; and significantly, they are more characteristic of the spatial attributes of a long poem than a short one: ‘Did our great Poets ever write short Pieces?’ (LJK, I, 170). The ‘great Poets’ to whom Keats refers are those of a distinctly native literary tradition and his admiration of Elizabethan poetry is reflected in Endymion in its promotion of a colloquial idiom, ‘green’ world and more flexible rhyme scheme. But the pattern of literary history projected here and in his 3 February letter to Reynolds is ambivalent. The vast provinces and epic majesty of the ancients imply distance and remoteness as well as grandeur, and his final imperative, ‘I will cut all this’, contains a hint of uncertainty behind its apparent resolve: ‘I don’t mean to deny Wordsworth’s grandeur & Hunt’s merit’.12 In a subsequent letter to Reynolds of 3 May 1818, Keats once again considers the nature of ‘Wordsworth’s genius’ and ‘as a help, in the manner of gold being the meridian Line of worldly wealth,—how he differs from Milton’ (LJK, I, 278). In taking a comparative approach, he raises the broader question of whether English poetry has progressed from
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the Reformation to the present day, but this time his evaluation of the two poets is more optimistic and tentatively gives precedence to the former: —And here I have nothing but surmises, from an uncertainty whether Miltons apparently less anxiety for Humanity proceeds from his seeing further or no than Wordsworth: And whether Wordsworth has in truth epic passion<s>, and martyrs himself to the human heart, the main region of his song. (LJK, I, 278–9)
Although Keats is suspicious of the sincerity, and even perhaps the utility, of Wordsworth’s apparent anxiety for humanity, and implies that a more humane poetic vision may be achieved only at the expense of objective epic passion, he nonetheless sees Wordsworth as more closely allied to the internal and sympathetic workings of the human heart than Milton. He also sees the two poets as the ‘meridian’ lines of their respective times: as exceptional but ‘representative’ men they can be identified with a specific stage of cultural, social and historical development; in this case, the Reformation and the deistic, modern age of the post-Enlightenment, respectively.13 The concept of ‘representativeness’ was gaining currency in British literary history from the turn of the century. As James Chandler has demonstrated, Hazlitt’s aptly titled The Spirit of the Age (1825) was only one of several attempts by Scott, Shelley and others to filter the cultural experience of their age down to a representative essence.14 The idea was distinct both from the classical concept of ‘exemplary’ history (or the idea that history teaches by example across period boundaries) and from the aims of philosophic history. The ‘great men’ of classical and neoclassical history were not always representative of their respective ages, sometimes indeed prevailing in spite of the barbarity of their times; and they were not usually categorised in historical terms.15 The philosophic historians of the mid-eighteenth century, on the other hand, were more likely to attribute defining social and cultural features to the secret causes and silent movements of ‘manners’ and ‘opinion’ than they were to the characteristics of individual men. Hume’s portrait of Cromwell in The History of England (1754–62), for example, sees in him the fanaticism and turbulence of his age, just as his representation of Joan of Arc attributes the popular belief in her mystical qualities to the ‘fond fancy’ and general credulity of the time in which she lived. Both are shaped by and reflect their times but neither is inherently representative of them (History of England, VII, 29–30; III, 144–5).16 The idea of representativeness emerges more clearly in Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), which Keats read in 1818–19 and possibly earlier with Charles Cowden Clarke.17 Voltaire begins by outlining the four great
Ancients and Moderns
21
epochs of the human spirit; namely, the ages of Philip and Alexander, Caesar and Augustus, Mahomet II and Louis XIV (Louis XIV, I, 3–4). Although his history is not a ‘life’ of Louis XIV but rather a history of the mind and spirit of the age (I, 1), implicit in the text is the sense that Louis embodies the perfections and, ultimately, the weaknesses of the age itself. In a defence of his use of personal anecdotes, for example, Voltaire argues that, despite inaccuracies and exaggerations, anecdotal material and the smaller incidents of an individual are sometimes of more interest and importance than the revolutions of countries (II, 1); and the representation of Louis’s reign as a tragedy in chapters 18–22 of the history in many ways parallels or embodies the overarching story of France’s national decline and defeat (I, 300–75).18 Unlike Hume’s monarchs in The History of England, Louis XIV is central to the peculiar energy and glory of his age, even if, on balance, Voltaire is more concerned with the larger movements and silent causes that underlie historical events than he is with minute causality or individual men. References to exemplary men such as Brutus, King Alfred, William Tell, William Wallace, Sidney, Vane and Milton permeate Keats’s 1817 Poems and are one of his first volume’s most notable features. Aileen Ward has suggested that ‘[h]istory [for Keats]’ during his adolescence ‘satisfied a[nother] deep need, for heroes to worship’; but Keats quickly arrives at a more nuanced understanding of what it means to write in a particular cultural and historical moment.19 By mid-1818, his ahistorical emphasis on exemplary men gives way to the more historically specific idea of representative men in the form of Wordsworth and Milton; and his 3 May letter to Reynolds is more concerned with the historicity of cultural achievement than it is with defining the specific cultural features of his own or Milton’s age. Unlike Hazlitt, who tends to repress the comparative element of his argument in The Spirit of the Age and attempts instead to establish in each of his representative figures key (although often contradictory) characteristics of the age in which they live, Keats does not offer any explicit arguments as to why Milton and Wordsworth should be considered the representative poets of their time, instead seeking to understand their achievements in relative terms.20 His subsequent comparison of the two poets locates the movements of literary history within a broader historical narrative from the Reformation onwards using a generally progressive developmental model derived from his reading of Robertson’s History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769) and Voltaire’s sweeping Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756), both of which he owned and read either at school or with Cowden Clarke. Keats argues that ‘[t]he Reformation produced such immediate and great<s> benefits, that Protestantism was considered under the
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John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment
immediate eye of heaven, and its own remaining Dogmas and superstitions, then, as it were, regenerated, constituted those resting places and seeming sure points of Reasoning’ (LJK, I, 282). In pointing out those intellectual certainties assumed by Milton and his age, he adopts an attitude of sceptical inquiry towards custom and received knowledge. His argument that even the greatest minds of the Reformation were curtailed by the persistence of religious dogma and superstition suggests the influence of Leigh Hunt as well as Enlightenment sceptics and deists such as D’Holbach and Voltaire, who argued in their Le Christianisme dévoilé (1761) and Dictionnaire philosophique, respectively, that the ‘vulgar superstition’ of Christianity was unenlightened.21 Keats may repeatedly compare Wordsworth’s selfconsciousness and egotistical sublime to the impartiality and disinterestedness of the Elizabethans, but for all its ‘circumscribed grandeur’ (LJK, I, 280), the advantage of the enlightened age is that it has, to some extent, rejected the absurdities of religious superstition.22 By drawing on the sceptical tone, comparative language and broadly progressive movement of Enlightenment schemes of history, Keats is able to align changes in literary history with more extensive changes in manners, customs and opinion, and to situate the development of poetry within the wider movements of general history. Unlike Johnson’s Lives, which emphasises the ahistorical nature of poetic genius, or Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age, which confines its examination to a single historical moment, his analysis of the two poets eschews what we now consider to be Romantic notions of individual genius in favour of explanations which are dependent on movements in social and cultural history; in effect, arguing that men and their achievements are relative to the age in which they live.23 Keats, in other words, ultimately resolves his aesthetic dilemma by representing the genius of Wordsworth’s poetry as the result of a generally progressive trend in history rather than ‘individual greatness of Mind’ (LJK, I, 281): ‘What is then to be inferr’d? O many things—It proves there is really a grand march of intellect’ (LJK, I, 282). Keats’s comparative and progressive model of Western European intellectual development is heavily indebted to his reading of Robertson and Voltaire. Robertson outlines, for example, in his History of Scotland (1759) and more fully in The History of Charles V a descriptive model for the development of the European states as they progressed from feudal to commercial societies.24 In the former, he begins by sketching the nature of feudalism in Europe, a form of government which is initially described as ‘altogether military’, but which soon degenerates into a system of encroachment perpetuated by the demands of the aristocracy (History of Scotland, I, 13).25 In the opening ‘A View of the Progress of Society in
Ancients and Moderns
23
Europe’ in The History of Charles V, feudalism is similarly presented as a violent and pernicious system of virtual slavery, the evil effects of which extend to the human mind and thus to the arts and sciences (I, 16–17, 19).26 More generally, however, Robertson seeks to explicate in the ‘View’ the causes behind the great revolutions from the fall of the Roman Empire to the sixteenth century and hence to understand the emergence of civil society during the administration of Charles V (I, 11), arguing that ‘in order to exhibit a just view of the state of Europe at the opening of the sixteenth century, it is necessary to look back, and to contemplate the condition of the northern nations upon their first settlement in those countries which they occupied’ (I, 12). The model of development he establishes is one of continuous but cyclical progress. From the eleventh century manners begin to improve and Robertson follows Hume in the claim that ‘there is an ultimate point of depression, as well as of exultation, from which human affairs naturally return in a contrary progress, and beyond which they seldom pass either in their advancement or decline’ (I, 21). This so-called ‘contrariety’ model developed from classical and seventeenth-century cyclical theories of history, but it was not until the eighteenth century that the movements of history were regularly presented as a ‘single pattern of contrary motion’.27 Robertson goes on to outline a number of causes that combine gradually to abolish barbarism and introduce order and refinement in Europe. Chief among them is the regulation of canon law and the reestablishment of civil jurisprudence, which together reduce the encroachment of the ecclesiastical sphere. In the main body of The History of Charles V, he similarly argues for the positive effects of the sixteenthcentury Reformation on the development of civil society (II, 258). Luther uncovers generations of corruption, and although Robertson tends to present the Reformation as an event in secular rather than ecclesiastical history, the ‘famous secularity’ of his account is clearly employed in its favour: ‘The Reformation, wherever it was received, increased that bold and innovating spirit to which it owed its birth’ (Charles V, II, 258–9; see also II, 348–9).28 His generally positive view of the Reformation is certainly echoed in Keats’s May 1818 letter to Reynolds, which at once concedes its benefits, while seeing it as tainted by the dogma and enthusiasm intrinsic to the period. In the Essai sur les mœurs, Voltaire also considers the development of Europe from feudalism to commercialism and modern statehood.29 He, too, argues that the development of the French state occurs mainly because of its rejection of the nobility and related feudal structures (Essai, II, 936).30 Like Robertson, he notes the intellectual and other
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improvements that occurred in Europe after the chaos of the early Middle Ages, but emphasises even more strongly the relapses into barbarism, such as the savagery and fanaticism of the crusades, which temporarily interrupt the tendency towards order and civilisation (II, 558–600). The Reformation, for example, is a primarily positive event, which nonetheless indirectly results in the Saint Bartholomew Day massacre (II, 486–97); and the brutalities that accompany the discovery and colonisation of America likewise demonstrate mankind’s propensity for temporary relapses into barbarism (II, 330–93). There are a number of important similarities between Robertson’s and Voltaire’s view of the development of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire: first, they privilege commerce, the decline of feudalism and the decline of ecclesiastical power as major contributing factors; second, they both define feudalism as an intellectual and cultural as well as an economic construction; third, they see the sixteenth century as the birthplace of modernity; and finally, they emphasise the relapses into violence, barbarity and fanaticism that recur even in the comparatively civilised sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.31 More fundamentally, however, they both seek to promote a ‘philosophy of history’ by analysing the proportional and regular causes beneath the apparent randomness of human history, thereby reducing the multiplicity of history to the ‘single and penetrating vision’ of the natural sciences; and like other philosophic historians, they seek to broaden the scope of history from a narrow concern with high politics to a wider interest in social experience, including the history of literature, manners, commerce, custom and opinion.32 Peter Gay has suggested that the inductive generalisation of philosophic history has much in common with scientific empiricism, describing Dictionnaire philosophique as ‘a thoroughly Newtonian book’ and maintaining that Newtonianism taught Voltaire ‘to “examine, weigh, calculate, and measure, but never conjecture”’.33 In the Essai sur les mœurs and Siècle de Louis XIV, too, Voltaire arguably employs a quasi-empirical methodology by attempting to deduce history from the evidence supplied by manners and opinion rather than forcing it into a preconceived framework or hypothesis.34 More recently, however, a number of commentators have argued that the ‘apparent empirical rigour’ of philosophic history is compromised by its assumption of a constant or invariable human nature; and Hume, Robertson, Voltaire and other Enlightenment historians have accordingly been severely condemned for being ‘unhistorical’.35 But as Duncan Forbes has pointed out, while philosophic historians such as Hume appeal to ‘the secret operation of contrary causes’ beneath the apparent randomness of history and to a fundamental core of human nature that has never significantly changed, they are also acutely aware of
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25
the differences in custom and character between men of diverse ages and countries (Enquiry, pp. 87, 85–6). Whatever the historical errors involved in attributing uniformity to belief as well as to actions or events, their analysis of historical testimony on the grounds of probability is nonetheless suggestive of an empirical concern with evidence and causation that was rarely applied to historical writing before the eighteenth century.36 Keats’s own discussion of the political state of England after Peterloo in a letter to the George Keatses dated 17–27 September 1819 (‘I will give you a little politics’) similarly attempts to uncover the underlying causes behind a longer British historical and political tradition, and follows the developmental narrative set out in Robertson’s ‘View’ and Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs by adopting a contrariety model of general progress disrupted by temporary periods of decline: ‘All civiled countries become gradually more enlighten’d and there should be a continual change for the better … Three great changes have been in progress – First for the better, next for the worse, and a third time for the better once more’ (LJK, II, 193). However tentative his view of progress (‘there should be a continual change for the better’), Keats reiterates Voltaire’s and Robertson’s causal analysis of the improvements that occurred in Europe after the eleventh century, citing as his first great change ‘the gradual annihilation of the tyranny of the nobles. when kings found it their interest to conciliate the common people, elevate them and be just to them’.37 The second great change or causal factor he outlines is the subsequent ‘long struggle of kings to destroy all popular privileges’: ‘The obligation of kings to the Multitude began to be forgotten … kings turned to the Nobles as the adorners of the[i]r power, the slaves of it, and from the people as creatures continually endeavouring to check them’. Keats’s reference to the ‘obligation of kings’ echoes the arguments of Bolingbroke’s influential theory of governance in The Idea of a Patriot King (1749), which invokes the notion of a monarch who is capable of restoring civil and moral order to Britain by fulfilling his contract with the common people. Keats may well have read the extracts from Bolingbroke’s Patriot King in Cowden Clarke’s commonplace book, but his reading of Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs and Siècle de Louis XIV would also have revealed to him the despotism of the sixteenth century: ‘the french were abject slaves under Lewis 14th’ (LJK, II, 193).38 Keats goes on to argue that the ‘unlucky termination’ of the French revolution has had the temporary effect of returning Europe to the age of autocracy and ‘horrid superstition’ (LJK, II, 193). Like Voltaire in Dictionnaire philosophique and the Essai sur les mœurs, he sees the development of human history as a constant struggle against superstition, but he is
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convinced that the ‘third change, the change for the better’ is ‘in progress again’, and cites as a cause of his optimism evidence of the reduction of factionalism or ‘party spirit now in England’ (LJK, II, 194), evincing an anti-party agenda that was influenced by Voltaire’s intense dislike of sectarianism in Le Siècle de Louis XIV and Dictionnaire philosophique, as well as by Hazlitt’s claim in his 1817 essay ‘On the Tendency of Sects’ that party-spirit has a natural tendency to narrow the mind (HW, IV, 47). He would, however, have needed to look no further than Pope’s lines and the motto of Leigh Hunt’s journal, the Examiner: ‘Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few.’ 39 Curiously, after describing in sweeping terms the great revolutions that have taken place in Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire, Keats claims in relation to this perceived decrease in factionalism that ‘apparently small causes make great alternations. There are little signs whereby we may know how matters are going on’ (LJK, II, 194). His subsequent comment on the momentous nature of Richard Carlile’s blasphemy trial for the publication of deistical pamphlets, an event far more local than those of the great changes previously referred to in the letter, as well as his reference to Henry Hunt’s ‘triumphal entry into London’ after the Peterloo massacre, suggests an awareness of the way in which changes can have their source in apparently insignificant springs. His attention to minute causality implies a sensitivity towards those aspects of history which are either local examples of a more general rule or which do not conform to the regular and proportional changes of philosophic history; and he can even be decidedly pessimistic. In an earlier letter to his brother Tom, written while travelling through Scotland and Ireland in July 1818, Keats acknowledges that even in the ‘present state’ of society, the common people live in appalling conditions, and he explicitly rejects the idea that he lives in ‘enlightened’ times: ‘this convinces me that the world is very young and in a verry ignorant state—We live in a barbarous age’ (LJK, I, 320). Significantly, it is not just Ireland and Scotland (or the less civilised peripheries of Britain) that are ‘barbarous’, but the age more generally. Keats is not, therefore, simply an uncomplicated and optimistic early nineteenth-century liberal; nor is his intention solely ‘to represent historical change as the liberal habitually sees it’.40 Following Voltaire and Robertson, the representation of history in his letters alternates between a progressive agenda and an awareness of the extent to which minute details, and the recurrence of political and cultural violence, problematise arguments in favour of linear and even cyclical progress. Similarly, his reflections on literary history and the development of poetry from the Elizabethans to Wordsworth swing from an aggressive faith in himself and
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his contemporaries to a concern with ‘the Cliff of Poesy … above me’ (LJK, I, 141). More recently, some critics have argued that Keats had a more optimistic attitude towards his literary inheritance than has previously been assumed; but as Greg Kucich reminds us, the problem is not so much that this inconsistency in authorial attitude exists, but rather ‘in our tendency to dehistoricise literary influence by investigating the dynamics of poetic relations on exclusively psychoanalytic and textual levels’.41 Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in critical responses to Keats’s early verse, which generally condemn (but sometimes celebrate) Endymion and the 1817 Poems as ‘sentimental’, ‘immature’ and ‘mawkish’.42 Jeffrey Cox has demonstrated the extent to which Keats’s early poetry has been wronged by having his ‘ideological gestures’ read as ‘aesthetic errors’. In suggesting that the poetry of Keats’s first volume is social poetry and that it needs to be seen as part of a larger project, he rightly seeks to resituate the 1817 Poems within the wider context of the Cockney School and the Hunt coterie; but Keats’s letters suggest that he also saw his poetry as something to be understood in the context of still wider debates.43 His evident concern in Sleep and Poetry and I stood tiptoe upon a little hill with the relationship between contemporary poetry and a larger national literary inheritance is part of his exploration of historiographical ideas about the interdependence of literature, manners and society. In this light, the poems can be read not so much as involuntary psychological reactions towards the ‘burden’ of the past, but rather as textual manifestations of Keats’s more deliberate attempt to situate or position himself in relation to the movements of literary history and to engage in the broader period concern of national self-making.
Schemes of Literary History in Sleep and Poetry and I stood tip-toe upon a little hill The development of literary history in the mid-eighteenth century arose in part from a belief that native or national characteristics could more easily be traced in the history of imaginative literature than in that of general or regular history. Mark Salber Phillips has demonstrated that literary history became a prime means of communicating those historical concerns that were neglected by traditional historiographical frameworks, in particular the history of manners and opinion, and of national, local and everyday life. The new Enlightenment emphasis on manners and other forms of social experience encouraged the development of emergent representative techniques and structural devices; and while some literary
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histories, such as Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), continued to prioritise the classical virtues of unity and linearity in historical writing, others, as in the case of plans by Pope, Spence and Gray, attempted to impose an encyclopedic methodology. Still others, such as Warton’s History of English Poetry, dismissed linear and taxonomic approaches in favour of a more ‘organic’ narrative structure.44 It has been argued that Warton’s rejection of earlier literary-historical taxonomies reflects a movement away from Enlightenment developmental frameworks towards a psychology of ‘conflict’, and this so-called Wartonian ‘master-narrative’ has proved critical to conceptions of British Romanticism that follow Harold Bloom’s pervasive ‘anxiety of influence’ argument.45 But far from rejecting a wider sociological framework, the History, in fact, presents ‘manners’ as the primary link between literary and more general history: ‘The manners and the poetry of a country are so nearly connected, that they mutually throw light on each other.’ Warton’s History accordingly includes within its remit historical analyses of various periods as well as chapters on intellectual history, all of which not only provide its organic narrative with a sense of structure, but are also themselves clearly indebted to the work of Gibbon, Robertson, Hume and other Enlightenment historians who saw literary history as part of a broader history of the social.46 Vincent Newey has persuasively argued that Keats read Warton’s History along with Joseph Warton’s Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756–82) and possibly Gray’s Progress of Poesy (1757) before writing Sleep and Poetry in 1816. It has also long been recognised that the section of the poem that deals with literary history draws on Leigh Hunt’s attack on the Augustans and the ‘French School’ of poetry in his 1815 edition of The Feast of the Poets, in which Hunt expresses his admiration for Spenser and comments on the French School’s displacement of the ‘natural idiom’ of British poetry. Both here and later in his preface to Foliage (1818), a copy of which Keats owned, he emphasises the vital connection between the wholesome manners and festive lifestyle of the ‘old school’ and their ‘natural’ poetry; like Warton, praising Fairfax’s translation of Tasso and the simplicity of Alfred while deprecating Pope’s poetry as ‘too harmonious’ and Scott’s novels as fashionable ‘imitations’, ‘affecting simplicities’ without displaying any natural bursts of passion.47 Hunt clearly attempts in The Feast, and to a lesser extent in Foliage, to participate in those larger historiographical debates initiated by Gray, Blair, Warton, Hurd and others about the relationship between literature, manners and opinion, essentially arguing for a connection between literary vitality and natural or native manners. In his 1815 essay ‘On Milton’s Versification’, which was so influential
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on lines 193–9 of Sleep and Poetry, Hazlitt joins Hunt in arguing that Restoration and Augustan poetry was the unnatural product of a foreign French influence, maintaining that it was ‘the poetry not of ideas, but of definitions: it proceeded in mode and figure, by genus and specific difference; and was the logic of schools, or an oblique and forced construction of dry, literal matter-of-fact’ (HW, IV, 40). Hazlitt represents this kind of poetry as partisan, constrained and over-regulated; and his critique of French philosophic rationalism is reminiscent of Francis Jeffrey’s suggestion in an 1811 review of the dramatic works of John Ford for the Edinburgh Review that the native ‘English muses’ had been ‘clipped and trimmed’ by the French School. In a later review of Scott’s edition of Swift in 1816, Jeffrey argues that ‘[b]y far the most considerable change which has taken place in the world of letters, in our days, is that by which the wits of Queen Anne’s time have been gradually brought down from the supremacy which they had enjoyed, without competition, for the best part of a century’, not only seeing the ‘fall’ of Restoration and Augustan poets as a defining moment in British literary history, but also going on to represent that fall as crucial to the recovery of an alternative school of literature associated with Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton.48 Hazlit elaborates on this alternative school and its relationship to a uniquely native literary tradition in his influential introductory lecture to ‘Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth’, in which he argues that the Elizabethans are the ultimate representatives of the ‘genius’ of British literature: Perhaps the genius of Great Britain … never shone out fuller or brighter, or looked more like itself, than at this period. Our writers and great men had something in them that savoured of the soil from which they grew: they were not French, they were not Dutch, or German, or Greek, or Latin; they were truly English. They did not look out of themselves to see what they should be; they sought for truth and nature, and found it in themselves. There was no tinsel, and but little art; they were not the spoiled children of affectation and refinement, but a bold, vigorous, independent race of thinkers … They were not at all sophisticated. The mind of their country was great in them, and it prevailed. (HW, VI, 175)49
This passage communicates a number of important ideas in relation to Hazlitt’s view of the development of British literature. First, he maintains that the Elizabethan writers are, above all others, ‘truly English’; their peculiar genius is a direct result of the fact that they did not look to foreign influences for literary inspiration. Second, he represents the idiom of the Elizabethans as ‘natural’ and argues for the reciprocity of literature and manners by contrasting their work with the artificial productions of those writers who are ‘the spoiled children of affection and refinement’.
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Later in the lecture, Hazlitt follows Warton in praising the gothic in literature and makes his attack on the French School explicit: ‘Our literature, in a word, is Gothic and grotesque; unequal and irregular … This character applies in particular to our literature in the age of Elizabeth, which is its best period, before the introduction of a rage for French rules and French models’ (HW, VI, 192). Like Warton, Hazlitt also undermines the positive connotations of the term refinement by associating it with French artifice and affectation, thereby complicating the whole notion of a progression in style and taste. He is very clear about the relationship between manners and poetry, providing an historical sketch of the foundations of Elizabethan genius from the influence of chivalry and the general good cheer and festivity of the times to the translations of classical works and the discovery of the New World (181–92), emphasising the liberty associated with the Reformation and its positive effect on literary culture (182). Despite the overwhelming ‘Englishness’ of his scheme of national literature, Hazlitt sees changes in manners and opinion as the most important influence on the evolving nature of literary production: the unique genius of the Elizabethans is ultimately explained by the wider history of manners and opinion. Hunt’s and Hazlitt’s criticism of the French School and their projection of a uniquely English or British school of poetry echoes other contemporary representations of literary history which associated the Restoration with an artificial French classicism. Following the counter-movements of Warton’s history, a striking number of narratives written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries represent British literary history as a process of ‘rupture and recovery’: the national school of Chaucer and Shakespeare is superseded by the importation of French classicism during the Restoration, but there is nonetheless a gradual return to the native power of the ‘old school’ of literature in more recent times.50 Keats himself outlines a similar theory of French corruption in his advocacy of ‘pure’ English in his letters, although he situates the French influence a good deal earlier than the Restoration and is less certain of a recovery: ‘The Paradise lost though so fine in itself is a curruption of our Language … The purest english I think—or what ought to be the purest—is Chatterton’s—the Language had existed long enough to be entirely uncorrupted of Chaucer’s gallicisms and still the old words are used’ (LJK, II, 212). Debates about pure English and rupture/recovery narratives were to some extent prompted by the eighteenth-century primitivist aesthetic, which privileged the literature of savage and uncivilised societies as vital, passionate and imaginative, but schemes of rupture and recovery were also political in the sense that they involved a ‘foreign yoke’ thesis.51 The emerging trend to separate English and French schools of poetry was itself
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essentially political in nature. England was at war with France for most of the eighteenth century, and the French revolution and Napoleonic aggression did nothing to ease anti-French sentiments in the early nineteenth century. Linda Colley has argued in the context of wider debates about the rise of nationalism and imperialism that Britain was an invention forged by war with France and conquered colonial peoples.52 The assertion of an independent ‘English’ or, increasingly, ‘British’ school of poetry was therefore part of a larger act of political and cultural selfdefinition, but the political utility of a national school of poetry was not confined to patriots and traditionalists like Burke or Jeffrey. Reformers, dissenters and other opponents of the crown could associate the artifice and triviality of the French style with the restoration of Charles II and, hence, with the monarchy more generally. Sleep and Poetry explicitly locates its literary narrative within Britain – ‘E’en in this isle’ (172) – and accordingly positions itself as a poem prepared to assert native rather than French standards of taste, as the explicit reference to Boileau in line 206 suggests.53 Keats famously begins his narrative of rupture in line 181 by referring to the ‘schism’ caused by Dryden and Pope – ‘with a puling infant’s force / They sway’d about upon a rocking horse, / And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal soul’d!’ (185–7) – and subsequently considers the only partial recovery of poetry in more recent times: ‘yet in truth we’ve had / Strange thunders from the potency of song; / Mingled indeed with what is sweet and strong, / From majesty’ (230–3). William Keach has shown us that Keats formally rejects the rules of Augustan verse in lines 181–206 by mockingly employing a childish rhythm and rhyme scheme (‘force’/‘horse’), but the poem does not attribute the ambivalent state of British letters to the Frenchified Augustan influence alone.54 Equally critical to the perceived decline in poetic vitality from the Restoration onwards is the assertion ‘that the high / Imagination cannot freely fly / As she was wont of old’ (163–5). By using the language of liberty and curtailment, Keats aligns qualitative changes in British poetry with broader changes in politics, manners, customs and opinion, thereby re-plotting the contours of literary history within a wider socio-historical schema. Like his sources from Warton to Hunt, he is working within the historicist framework of the Scottish Enlightenment by representing the literary style, characteristics and tastes of the relevant schools of poetry as a product of the manners and opinion of their respective ages. The artificial verse of the Augustans is ‘closely wed’ (194) to that period’s ‘musty laws’ (195), the corruption of British literature by a French standard (‘and in large / The name of one Boileau!’ (205–6)), and the false artificiality of Restoration manners: ‘a schism / Nurtured by foppery and barbarism’ (181–2). The state of
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modern poetry is similarly a reflection of the dark and ‘goaded world’ (387) of contemporary British politics, which reduces Alfred’s face to ‘anxious, pitying eyes’ (385) and renders ‘Kosciusko’s worn / By horrid sufferance—mightily forlorn’ (387–8). Kucich has noted the way in which the narrative of literary history in the poem anticipates the structure of Keats’s previously discussed 1819 portrayal of European history in his letters, in which he also employs a cyclical motion of ‘rupture and recovery’ or, in other words, a contrariety model of progress temporarily interrupted by reactionary lapses into decline (LJK, II, 192–4).55 Britain’s poetry, like its politics, has fallen into a ‘wretched rule’ (195) from which it may be rescued by ‘a fairer season’ (221). The reference to the curtailment of the imagination in lines 163–5 is therefore as much political as it is literary. Keats’s allusion to the unknowing complacency of Augustan poets – ‘Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead / To things ye knew not of’ (193–4) – resounds in later comments in his letters on contemporary British politics: ‘—as for Politics they are in my opinion only sleepy because they will soon be too wide awake’ (LJK, I, 396). And the potential for a contemporary application of phrases such as ‘wretched rule’ and ‘musty laws’ in a period in which the curtailment of civil liberties manifested itself the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act and blasphemy trials was not lost on Keats’s reviewers, who as Roe, Cox and others have demonstrated, were all too aware of his allegiance to Leigh Hunt and the Cockney School’s liberal political agenda.56 Hunt’s articles in the Examiner for 1815–19, which Keats read from 1814 onwards, represent a sustained attack on domestic suppression, legitimism and the restoration of autocratic governments after the fall of Napoleon: ‘[T]he Allies, with their violated promises, would not have it otherwise; and they will inevitably see the blessed fruit of that Divine Right which they would have re-planted’ (25 August 1816, p. 534). Like Keats, Hunt often represents his own age as part of a temporary decline in a wider pattern of historical improvement, and by the end of 1815, articles on national distresses and reactionary measures appear in nearly every edition of the Examiner: ‘Monks with their mummeries begin to parade the streets again; the age seems fairly sliding back into old times’ (10 December 1815, p. 786). Hunt repeatedly conceptualises the need for participatory government and parliamentary reform in Europe within the great British tradition of liberty, drawing on the unique nature of the English character and constitution: ‘We would … gladly see the English constitution prevailing all over Europe, and an end put at once to those absurd and pernicious systems of government, which lead princes to imagine that the many are made for the few, instead of the few for the
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many’ (2 January 1814, p. 1; see also 9 March 1817, p. 147). In presenting the idea of liberty as an historical right, Hunt represents Britain as the traditional homeland of a variety of freedoms and emphasises the crucial importance of public spirit in checking the onset of courtly encroachment: ‘In this country, it is true – thanks be to the spirit of individuals among the people, – such inclinations cannot so easily be consulted; and therefore the ruling powers are not likely to have them to such an extent’ (21 January 1816, p. 33). Increasingly, he thematises the idea of ‘public spirit’ within a longer British historical tradition and aligns his own perspective with the Whig view of history. The liberal pantheon represented by British patriots such as Alfred, Shakespeare, Milton, Sidney and Marvell forms a refrain that recurs throughout the Examiner from 1814–19: ‘To be dictated to by any body, is lamentable; but to have our liberties at the mercy of mere courtiers and official automatons … is too humiliating to a nation … that has had an alfred for a king, shakespeares and miltons for its poets, and sydneys, marvells, and steeles for its race of gentlemen’ (2 March 1817, p. 138). Keats’s allegiance to an ‘aggressive form of Whig liberalism’ is most evident in his Lines Written on 29 May, the Anniversary of Charles’s Restoration (1–3), but he also draws on the idea of traditional freedoms as a source of poetic stimulation and cultural progress in Sleep and Poetry: ‘yet there ever rolls / A vast idea before me, and I glean / Therefrom my liberty; thence too I’ve seen / The end and aim of Poesy’ (290–3). Newey has pointed out the significance of the word ‘ethereal’ for Keats in another context, arguing that he uses it in To Hope to oppose ‘the base purple of a court oppres’d’ (39).57 The ‘vast idea’ to which Keats alludes and from which he ‘gleans’ his liberty in Sleep and Poetry is typically and perhaps even deliberately vague, but in the context of the poem’s emphasis on political supression it may refer to ‘hope’ and, more specifically, to the hopes and freedoms associated with the English constitution and exemplified by the great patriots of the past. Hope is ‘ethereal’, intangible, a ‘vast idea’ that ‘rolls’ and flows through society; and it is this and a belief in Britain’s great tradition of liberty that provide the poet with a sanctuary amidst the ‘shiftings of all the mighty winds that blow’ (286). Unlike the patriots of old, contemporary poets seem unable to provide a palliative for the concerns of modern life, and Keats argues that even the finest of his contemporaries ‘feed[s] upon the burrs, / And thorns of life; forgetting the great end / Of poesy, that it should be a friend / To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man’ (244–7). His representation of the darkness and bitterness of contemporary verse draws on Hunt’s views on Byron, Coleridge and especially Wordsworth in The Feast of the Poets, in which Hunt acknowledges Wordsworth’s greatness, but censures his habit
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of ‘making a business of a reverie’ (which is the ‘next step to melancholy or indifference’) and of mistaking ‘the commonest process of reflection for its result’. He also argues that Wordsworth and some of the other Lake Poets had repudiated their radical principles, despising that ‘maudlin German cant which first infected their muse, at last corrupted their manners and … enabled them to change their free opinions for slavish ones, without altering the cast of their language’.58 The German influence of Kant and Schiller, like the earlier French influence of Boileau, is an agent of reactionary conservatism, as Hunt once again associates the foreign corruption of English manners and opinion with a concurrent decline in imaginative vitality. Despite Wordsworth’s obvious influence on Sleep and Poetry and other poems in the 1817 volume, Keats similarly condemns him and other contemporary poets for their ‘un-English’ and gloomy subjects of ‘Darkness, and worms, and shrouds, and sepulchres’ (243). His accusation of gloominess is politically charged: the modern poets lack the freedom, warmth and vivacity that Hunt and Hazlitt attribute to the native school of poetry, and also by implication to the new school represented by Hunt and his circle. But despite Keats’s avowed desire to write only of ‘hearteasing things’ (268), Sleep and Poetry is nonetheless an attempt to write the kind of poetry that could rival Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron in expressing ‘the agonies, the strife / Of human hearts’ (124–5). Keats was increasingly forced to recognise Wordsworth’s conservatism as well as the ‘palpable design’ that he believed characterised his poetry (LJK, I, 299, 224), but in lines 96–162 he follows Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey rather than Hunt in representing both individual and poetic development in terms of a staged progression: ‘Then will I pass the countries that I see / In long perspective’ (99–100). In taking a ‘long’ view of literary history, Sleep and Poetry expresses a wider agenda than that of simple partisan self-assertion. Just as Hunt conceptualises the contemporary need for parliamentary reform within the great British tradition of liberty, Keats not only embeds his scheme of literary development within a heavily politicised ‘rupture and recovery’ narrative, but also situates it within a broader developmental narrative that depicts the poet’s movement from the unreflective pastoral vision ‘Of Flora, and old Pan’ (102) towards ‘a nobler life’ (123) and a more ambiguous ‘sense of real things’ (157). This movement from unthinking pleasure to a deeper understanding of suffering and the human heart foreshadows the simile of human life in his ‘Mansion of Many Apartments’ letter to Reynolds of 3 May 1818 in which the brightness of the first and second chambers of human experience gradually darkens (LJK, I, 280–1).59 Like Wordsworth, Keats is never unambiguously progressive:
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the shifting and contrary motions of history are not entirely subsumed within the generally progressive trend towards aesthetic and moral enlightenment, and with the movement from pleasure to experience comes darkness and confusion. He may draw on the rhetoric of progress in the poem, describing his age as ‘a fairer season’ (221), but in the context of the previous line his assertion seems more like wish-fulfilment than reality: ‘But let me think away those times of woe’ (220, my emphasis). I stood tip-toe upon a little hill is another of the poems in Keats’s 1817 volume that attempts to define a new place and role for the modern poet in the diminished literary and political landscape of early nineteenthcentury Britain. By drawing on the tradition of eighteenth-century topographical poetry and the picturesque, as well as on the spatial metaphors that appear so frequently in his letters, Keats once again tries to resolve the problem of locating a position – one of those ‘Places of nestling green for Poet’s made’ – from which he could maintain a useful distance both from the epic passion of his literary past and the reactionary egotism of his contemporaries.60 The little hill is one such place, providing a site of tranquillity where the air is ‘cooling’ and ‘still’ (2), but also the opportunity for ‘wide wand’ring for the greediest eye, / To peer about upon variety’ (15–16). These lines recall the sense of elevation and ‘wide expansion’ as well as the wandering eye / ‘I’ of On Seeing the Elgin Marbles and On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, although the scale and magnitude of the hill are noticeably less dizzying than the ‘pinnacle and steep’ (3) of the former and the silent ‘peak’ (14) of the latter. Marjorie Levinson has noted the ‘spatial and conceptual diminutiveness’ of the poem, citing its little hill, cosy bowers and nestling places as examples of Keats’s (failed) attempt at refinement. The act of standing tip-toe implies for her the ‘unnatural elevation’ of the social climber: ‘the opposite of both the equal, wide survey – that manly gaze – and the elegant armchair passivity of the mental traveller’. The poem does indeed lack Wordsworthian gravity, but that is both its point and its point of departure from Wordsworth. It is addressed to Keats’s contemporaries rather than to the ‘Grecian grandeur’ of classical art and accordingly describes an elevation of reduced acuteness. Levinson’s brilliant reading of the poem as a ‘fetish-world’ of displaced desire and social fantasy neglects to consider its more deliberate critique of contemporary poetry and its relationship to circulating ideas on the development of literary history more generally.61 As in Sleep and Poetry, the pastoral vision seen from the hill is at first sufficient to inspire the modern poet as it did ‘a bard of old’ (163): ‘For what has made the sage or poet write/ But the fair paradise of Nature’s light?’ (125–6). This optimistic conviction initially charms him away from his troubles so that he feels, like later dreamers in The Fall of Hyperion
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and Ode to a Nightingale, ‘uplifted from the world’ (139). However, the poet is well aware of the diminished and unstable nature of his pastoral vision, noting that the spring of clear water: may haply mourn That such fair clusters should be rudely torn From their fresh beds, and scattered thoughtlessly By infant hands, left on the path to die. (43–6)
The ‘natural’ pleasures of the old school of poetry, represented by the ‘fair clusters’ in an untainted British landscape, have been ‘rudely’ uprooted and left to die by the ‘infant hands’ of contemporary poets, who would seek to recover the force and vitality of the old school of poetry, but whose writing has little of its regenerative power. Peacock makes much the same point in The Four Ages of Poetry (1820) when he represents the age of brass as a ‘second childhood’, arguing that the poet rakes ‘up the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown babies of an age’. Peacock essentially sees modern poetry as a cyclical but unsuccessful return to barbarous ages: ‘A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community … The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward.’ 62 In his lecture ‘On the Living Poets’ Hazlitt similarly presents the work of contemporary poets as an ineffectual retrogression to more primitive times: ‘They were for bringing poetry back to its primitive simplicity and state of nature, as he [Rousseau] was for bringing society back to the savage state’ (HW, V, 163). And in his 1814 review of Byron’s Corsair for the Edinburgh Review, Jeffrey, too, draws on circulating Enlightenment contrariety models in suggesting that poetry, like society, ‘is destined to complete a certain cycle, a great revolution, with respect at least to some of its essential qualities’. Jeffrey’s theory of literature is cyclical in that he describes a turning point or revolution in literary history (the demise of the age of politeness and a return to the vitality of earlier times), but it is not unequivocally progressive: a return to more primitive emotions will not necessarily result in the regeneration of contemporary poetry.63 Keats explicitly refers in lines 43–6 of I stood tip-toe to the rude state of contemporary poetry and in the lines that follow to the possibility of a new, but as yet unfulfilled, era of poetic promise and recovery as the literary cycle renews itself: ‘Dry up the moisture from your golden lids, / For great Apollo bids / That in these days your praises should be sung / On many harps, which he has lately strung’ (49–52). His representation of literary development seems more positive than the cyclical renditions of his contemporaries, but despite the optimism represented by these lines, the ‘light-hearted’ luxuries (25) seen from the little hill are quickly diminished by the disillusionment to which Keats also succumbs in Sleep and Poetry. He may deplore the roughness of ‘infant hands’, but his poem
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is not defined solely by its desire for cosy bowers. Its internal movement, like that of some of the later odes, is rather one of disenchantment: the visionary and mythic tales of Psyche and Pan shift uneasily from ‘ravishment’ and ‘wonder’ (147) to ‘darkness, —loneliness’ and ‘fearful thunder’ (148); and this movement from pastoral vision to painful reality echoes the sense of staged development in Sleep and Poetry, suggesting that the modern poet’s place in the contemporary cultural landscape is not simply defined by the tranquillity represented by the little hill. The darkness and suffering initially elided in the poem are eventually acknowledged as the true source of the creative process: it is only through the loss of Syrinx, for example, that Pan is turned into a poet of sorts, making a music of ‘balmy pain’ on a pipe fashioned out of her reeds (159–62). The ‘rudeness’ of contemporary poetry, which impinges on the poet’s pastoral vision in I stood tip-toe and which has obvious resonances with the ‘darkness’ of Sleep and Poetry, emerges in a more material way in the spatial metaphors of Keats’s letters as well as in a number of other poems in the 1817 volume, from O Solitude, if I must with thee dwell, in which Keats banishes London’s ‘jumbled heap / Of murky buildings’ (2–3) for the ‘steep’ of ‘Nature’s observatory’ (3–4), to To George Felton Mathew, in which he complains that his muse cannot ‘live / In this dark city’ (32–3), a feeling clearly echoed in To one who has been long in city pent. Similarly, in Sleep and Poetry the ‘unholy place’ (210) associated with the ‘common folk’ (211) of the contemporary literary scene is contrasted with the ‘pleasant hills’ (207) of ‘Delicious Avon’ (214); and Keats’s subsequent hope for a literary renewal or revival sees ‘trees uptorn’ (242) and ‘bitter weeds’ (249) transformed into ‘[a] silent space with ever sprouting green’ (251), which replaces the formerly crowded landscape of ‘choaking thorns’ (255). In presenting the changes in British literature as analogous to the overcrowding of the British landscape, and in particular to the ‘miasma of London’ (LJK, I, 299), Keats was drawing on a popular trope in literary histories and reviews of the period. Z’s infamous attacks on his own 1817 volume link his poetry with Hunt’s Cockney School, which Z (Lockhart and Wilson of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine) associates with urban life.64 In a passage from his Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817), Hazlitt contrasts the urban comedy of Congreve, Wycherley and Vanbrugh with ‘the comedy of nature’, which is generally to be found in Shakespeare (HW, IV, 313–14).65 And Jeffrey argues in an 1819 review of Thomas Campbell that the progress of British poetry ‘is not wholly dissimilar to that which the same causes have produced on the agriculture and landscape of the country’, thereby suggesting that poetic production is socially and economically contingent.66 Keats’s critique of contemporary poetry in I stood tip-toe is not, therefore, simply a reflection of his own
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‘mental topography’ or psychological anxiety with respect to Wordsworth or the great poets of the past, but instead resonates with circulating projections of literary development as a series of stages, states and cycles, in which the moderns, responding to the realities of a new urban landscape, represent a reversion to the primitive, savage poetry of the past but without its restorative powers.67 Once we situate Keats’s understanding of literary progress within the context of other contemporary literary narratives, it becomes clearer that Sleep and Poetry and I stood tip-toe are representations of received and popular ideas relating to literary history. In Sleep and Poetry Keats represents the schism caused by Restoration and Augustan poets as a reflection of the ‘musty laws’ and corrupt manners of their time, while portraying the contemporary decline in poetic vitality as a result of the reactionary and ‘goaded world’ of the political scene after the fall of Napoleon. In I stood tip-toe he sees the decline in poetic achievement as part of an unsuccessful cyclical retrogression to more primitive stages, and presents literary changes as analogous to changes in the landscape of contemporary Britain, thereby associating movements in literary history with a wider set of social and economic developments. Like his letters, these poems not only demonstrate Keats’s participation in the literary and historical debates of his time, but also indicate the degree to which reviewers and literary historians, such as Jeffrey and his associates at the Edinburgh Review, transmitted the ‘historical interests of their Enlightenment mentors to a new generation of readers’.68 Following Jeffrey, Hunt and Hazlitt established the rupture/recovery narrative as the predominant story of Romantic-era literary history, but they also continued to incorporate it with their wider historical interests; in particular, the history of manners, taste and opinion that they developed from the work of Enlightenment historians such as Robertson, Hume and Warton. This is not to suggest that Jeffrey and the others were unconcerned or unaffected by the ‘anxiety of influence’ and the psychological aspects of poetic achievement. Nor would I wish to deny the sense of belatedness that permeates Keats poems and letters. However, in the 1817 Poems this anxiety converges with, and is to some extent subsumed by, broader considerations relating to the development of taste in polite society. The narrative of national poetry from the Elizabethans to the moderns, the corruption of a native English tradition by the ‘foreign idiom’ of the French and German Schools (LJK, II, 212), and the close connection between manners and poetic vitality all provide Keats’s early poetry with the historical and sociological quality that also pervades his letters. His narrative of personal development must, therefore, be read in conjunction with a broader trope of development in his work about the evolution of society, manners and taste.
Chapter 2
Civil Society: Sentimental History and Enlightenment Socialisation in Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes
In Sleep and Poetry Keats asserts the voice of a ‘new school’ of poetry alluded to by Hunt in an 1816 article for the Examiner, in which he introduces three young poets (Shelley, Reynolds and Keats) and refers to a school ‘which promises to extinguish the French one that had prevailed among us since the time of Charles the 2d’ (1 December 1816, p. 716). The article appears after a long tirade on The Times and its support for ‘the right divine of kings to govern wrong’, lending by association an overtly political dimension to the article on the ‘Young Poets’: unlike the increasingly reactionary Lake School, the new school of poetry is conspicuously aligned with the constitutional reform movement.1 Keats may later contest Hunt’s cheerful ‘sociability’ model with his own emerging emphasis on the importance of suffering and sorrow for creative development, but by criticising Restoration and contemporary poets alike in Sleep and Poetry, he momentarily assumes the role attributed to him by Hunt: that of a young ‘Calidore’ attempting to bring down the reactionary Lake School and the conservative French School.2 Greg Kucich has demonstrated that chivalry and the crusades are central to Keats’s early self-definition, arguing that his allusions to himself as a crusading knight ‘embody his own “ambitious heat” as an aspiring boy-poet’.3 The aggressively asserted imagery of health, action and vigour in poems such as Specimen of an Induction to a Poem, Woman! when I behold thee and Calidore: A Fragment certainly defies contemporary reviews of the 1817 volume as well as later socio-stylistic readings of the poems, many of which are redolent with the language of sickness, disease and phobia.4 While reviewers saw the luxurious sentimentalism of this early verse as something close to the sickly ‘metromania’ of the Della Cruscans, Keats, like other members of his circle, was attempting to situate his poems within a wider set of historiographical debates concerning chivalry and the crusades, and their relationship to the development of European culture and society.5 Not only does he explicitly associate Hunt
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with chivalry in To Charles Cowden Clarke (42–8) and Specimen of an Induction to a Poem (60–1), but he also echoes Hunt’s repeated calls in the Examiner for a return to the manners and ideals of the chivalric age after the disappointments of the French revolution and Napoleonic wars. In an article entitled ‘Posthumous Gallantry’ in the Examiner for 27 March 1814, Hunt bewails the scale of contemporary luxury, warmongering and money-getting, and argues for the restoration of the selfless and gallant manners of ‘antique’ times (pp. 207–8). Some of his ‘Round Table’ essays also involve a comparison of modern manners with the unity, vigour and gallantry of King Arthur’s court. In a 1 January 1818 article, for example, Hunt claims that he has attempted to revive ‘the spirit of that great British Monarch, who, we all know, was to return again to light from his subterraneous region, and repair the Round Table in all its glory’, arguing that ‘[o]ur Round Table, to a certain degree, is inevitably associated in our minds with him’ (pp. 13, 12). Hunt goes on explicitly to connect chivalry, liberty and the progress of moral reform, depicting ‘chivalrous persons’ as ‘so many moral reformers’ who ‘carried light into darkness, and liberty among the imprisoned’; and in his darkness/light and imprisonment/freedom metaphors, he depicts chivalry as part of a more general passage from superstition and ignorance to social and moral refinement (p. 12). In representing chivalry in this way, Hunt was following Warton, Robertson and other Christian historians who saw chivalry and the crusades as part of the progress of European society from rudeness to refinement.6 Whereas Gibbon, Voltaire and Hume tended to represent chivalry as fanciful and emphasised the inhumanity of the crusades, Warton notes in his History of English Poetry that they ‘excited a new spirit of enterprise’ and ‘introduced into the courts and ceremonies of European princes, a higher degree of splendor and parade, caught from the riches and magnificence of eastern cities’.7 He shares with Robertson the idea that the crusaders picked up on more sophisticated manners and customs during their travels, and that this contributed to their chivalrous defence of injured innocence at home (Charles V, I, 25–6, 69–70). Chivalry may be ‘a wild institution, the effect of caprice, and the source of extravagance’, but, for Robertson, it nonetheless has ‘a very serious influence in refining the manners of the European nations’ (I, 69); and he even goes so far as to argue that it embodies the ‘chief circumstances which distinguish modern from ancient manners’ (I, 71). The chivalric hero was therefore a figure closely associated with the progress of honour, delicacy and sentiment in Enlightenment historiography – even by those historians who rejected the crusades as an example of fanaticism and human folly – and chivalry itself was credited
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with the improvement of European manners and society from the eleventh century onwards. Keats’s knights in the 1817 Poems tend to similarly conflate moral action and delicacy of feeling. Young Calidore may paddle ‘o’er the lake; / His healthful spirit eager and awake’ (Calidore, 1–2), but he is a figure of refinement as well as enterprise, and his interactions with the female sex are gentle and sentimental: ‘He feels a moisture on his cheek, and blesses / With lips that tremble, and with glistening eye, / All the soft luxury / That nestled in his arms’ (90–3). Keats was aware of the sentimental nature of Spenser’s rendition of chivalry in The Faerie Queene (1590–6), marking Una’s anxieties and Redcrosse’s despair, and underlining Spenser’s own response to their sufferings, but his association of sentiment and suffering with chivalry is also evident from his heavily marked copy of Southey’s 1807 translation of the Spanish quest romance Palmerin of England (1547–8).8 Although Southey comments in the preface on the abstract nature of the hero’s ‘generosity, virtue and courage, with nothing to stamp and individualize the possessor’, as well as on the heroine’s lack of ‘heart or character’, the flyleaf at the end of the first volume of his edition contains three revealing notes by Keats. The first refers to ‘Chap. 6.’ of the text and in particular to ‘The funeral image – the Castle of Sadness’; the second to ‘Ch. 21.’ or ‘The Sorrowful Valley’ and the third to ‘Ch. 23. – The Battle of the Fom [for Floraman?] Knights’, a chapter concerning a battle leading to death and immense destruction.9 Keats’s markings within the text itself can primarily be categorised into two groups: the first relates to passages on jousts, tournaments and honour; the second, to episodes dealing with unhappiness, suffering, wrongs and redress.10 It is not difficult to see how the markings in the first category could have made their way into the descriptions of crusading knights in the 1817 Poems, but more important for present purposes is the far larger second category of textual markings, all of which emphasise sorrow, suffering, death, pain or tears.11 Keats marks numerous passages in which the landscape is described as ‘dark and mournful’ or the water as ‘loud and fearful’. He also highlights extracts relating to ruins, and to men and women dressed in black with ‘sad complexions’ and ‘sorrowful aspect’.12 He marks in particular those sections of the text relating to the ‘Knight of the Vaulted Chamber’, whose sorrow is without hope or cure, underlining, for example, a section on the knight’s black marble tomb with death sculptured on it, recalling the ‘sculptured dead’ (14) of The Eve of St. Agnes. He also marks those sections relating to the ‘Knight of Death’ and the ‘Knight of Fortune’, the latter of whom is described as being ‘sad one hour, and sadder another’; and he consistently highlights passages referring to blood and wounds.13 One of the most significant passages that Keats marks refers to
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Floraman’s unhappiness, ‘which caused him to wander in heaviness, till the dark night overshadowed him’. This description of the knight’s wanderings inevitably evokes images of another knight – Endymion and his unhappy quest for immortal love: ‘Alas! ’tis his old grief. For many days, / Has he been wandering in uncertain ways’ (Endymion, II, 47–8).14 While he was reading Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Southey’s translation of Palmerin, Keats was redrafting Calidore as part of his preparation for Endymion, a poem in which he essentially internalises his knight’s quest by emphasising the importance of suffering for personal and creative development: ‘Until we are sick, we understand not;—in fine, as Byron says, “Knowledge is Sorrow”; and I go on to say that “Sorrow is Wisdom”’ (LJK, I, 279).15 Harold Bloom sees the ‘internalization of Quest-Romance’ as a dominant feature of Romantic poetry in general, arguing that ‘the Romantic movement is from nature to the imagination’s freedom … and the imagination’s freedom is frequently purgatorial, redemptive in directions but destructive of the social self’.16 The idea of Endymion’s journey as an internalised quest-romance is a useful one, but I wish to demonstrate that this interior site of operation is not necessarily destructive of the social self, and that the movement in this and other poems towards internal and ‘sentimental’ representation functions only within a broader sociological framework that continues to draw on Enlightenment developmental models and socialisation theories.
Scott, Godwin, Hazlitt and the Internal ‘History of Feeling’ By the time Keats came to write Endymion in 1817 the philosophic history of the mid- to late Enlightenment had been challenged by an emerging sentimentalist interest in history as internal experience, a type of history that emphasised the importance of expressive and affective narrative techniques such as eye-witness accounts and epistolary form, as well as the value of memoir, biography and the private life more generally.17 Keats’s letters and 1817 Poems rely as much on Enlightenment modes and models of representation as they do on sentimental or psychological ones, but in Endymion – the first lengthy ‘test’ of his imagination (LJK, I, 169) – he explicitly rejects an external history of action in favour of an internal history of feeling. Not only does he sublimate more general history to the history of poetry in the induction to book four of the poem, in which he traces the development of the muse from ‘northern grot’ (IV, 4) and ‘wolfish den’ (5) to the ‘full accomplishment’ (18) of its ‘native hopes’ (17), but in the induction to the second book he claims that the records of love
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have a more permanent emotional force than the habitually violent history of public actions and events: ‘O sovereign power of love! O grief! O balm! / All records, saving thine, come cool, and calm, / And shadowy, through the mist of passed years’ (II, 1–3).18 Although the narrator goes on to dismiss history as a ‘cheat’ because it does not record what is most relevant to human experience – ‘Hence, pageant history! hence, gilded cheat! / Swart planet in the universe of deeds!’ (II, 14–15) – Keats does not argue here that history is less significant than love or that social reality should be replaced by idealism, instead rejecting the type of history that is both false or specious and a public show or spectacle, symbolised by voyages (‘goodly vessels’), conquerors (‘the great Athenian’ admiral and ‘striding Alexander’) and heroes (‘old Ulysses’) (II, 20, 23–4, 26).19 His disavowal of history is thus a rejection of the ‘gilded’ closure of philosophic history and the public spectacle of classical history in favour of a more private, internal and sentimental history represented by Elizabethan heroines overwhelmed by love. Juliet ‘sighing’ (28), ‘Hero’s tears’, ‘the swoon of Imogen’ (31) and ‘Fair Pastorella in the bandit’s den’ (32) are, the narrator claims, ‘things to brood on with more ardency / Than the death-day of empires’ (II, 33–4). This distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ subjects and modes of representation was to play an increasingly important role in Keats’s poetic and critical agenda. We have already seen the extent to which it informs his discussion of the differences between Milton and Wordsworth in his 3 May 1818 letter to Reynolds, in which he tentatively ascribes the latter’s ascendency to his belief that Wordsworth has seen further into the internal workings of the human heart than Milton; and in a later letter to his brother and sister-in-law of 16 December 1818–4 January 1819, he extracts an important passage on representative techniques from the lecture ‘On the English Novelists’, in which Hazlitt contrasts the ‘internal’ romances of Godwin with the ‘external’ romances of Scott: If the one owes almost every thing to external observation and traditional character, the other owes every thing to internal conception and contemplation of the possible workings of the human Mind … For the effect both in Caleb Williams and St Leon, is entirely made out, not by facts nor dates, by blackletter or magazine learning, by transcript nor record, but by intense and patient study of the human heart, and by an imagination projecting itself into certain situations, and capable of working up its imaginary feelings to the height of reality. (LJK, II, 25)
Hazlitt argues that Godwin relies less on ‘external observation’ and documentary evidence than he does on ‘internal conception’ and the imaginative process of sympathetic identification, a quality that Hazlitt had himself earlier outlined as one of the most important motivating
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factors for human action and moral judgement in his 1805 Essay on the Principles of Human Action.20 While Hazlitt’s comments do not explicitly refer to the historical elements of Scott’s and Godwin’s novels, his distinction between external and internal modes of observation has clear affinities with the way in which those writers themselves believed that history could be represented in fiction as well as in extra-historical genres such as biography and memoir. Godwin’s Life of Chaucer (1803), for example, claims to be a ‘new species’ by which the reader is to ‘become truly acquainted with the history of his [Chaucer’s] mind, and the causes which made him what he was’. Godwin indicates that his life will include an Enlightenment-style ‘survey of the manners, the opinions, the arts and the literature, of the age in which the poet lived’, but he is also ‘anxious to rescue for a moment the illustrious dead from the jaws of the grave, to make them pass in review before me … to make myself their master of ceremonies, to introduce my reader to their familiar speech, and to enable him to feel for the instant as if he had lived with Chaucer’. Here he represents himself as the reader’s guide or escort and wishes, if only momentarily, to invigorate the ‘cold tempers’ and ‘sterile imaginations’ of antiquaries by infusing the biography with those internal and dramatic elements usually associated with works of the imagination.21 Godwin’s posthumously published 1797 pamphlet ‘Of History and Romance’ also evinces a change to the rationalist framework of his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793).22 The essay begins by arguing that there are two types of history: the study of society or ‘mankind in a mass’ and the study of the individual. The former, Godwin maintains, is a history of abstraction and tends to neglect the importance of individuals by focusing on ‘the progress and varieties of civilization’ and ‘the causes that operate universally upon masses of men under given circumstances’. The latter is local, particular and concrete. It quickly becomes clear that Godwin’s primary target is not so much history in general as the philosophic history of the Enlightenment; and while he does not reject the value of this type of history entirely, he objects to the prevailing opinion that it is philosophic history alone that is deserving of serious attention. Its advocates, he claims, ‘disdain the records of individuals’ and consider the engagement of the passions ‘a symptom of effeminacy’. Godwin’s assault on the abstractions of philosophic history is two-fold. First, he argues that it is inherently alien to human understanding: ‘The mind of man does not love abstractions. Its genuine and native taste … rests entirely in individualities’. Second, he attacks philosophic history on its own terms by maintaining that, even if we accept its aims and principles, it is impossible in application: ‘Those who study revenue or
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almost any other of the complex subjects above enumerated are ordinarily found … to have confounded themselves with a labyrinth of particulars, than to have risen to the dignity of principles.’ Philosophic history is not, therefore, only ‘a dry and frigid science’ because it is abstracted from the ‘passions and peculiarities’ of individuals, but also fails on its own terms by being unable to transform the baffling multiplicity of life into the set of intellectual principles on which its dignity supposedly rests.23 Scott is ostensibly less critical of philosophic history than Godwin, disapproving of those histories, including Godwin’s Life of Chaucer and Warton’s History of English Poetry, which he thought overly sentimental.24 His own 1818 Encyclopedia Britannica ‘Essay on Chivalry’ begins by setting out the parameters of what is essentially a philosophic and conjectural history of chivalry; and in his ‘Essay on Romance’ he argues that the tendencies towards different types of romance reflect the national characteristics and states of society in which they were written, thereby drawing on the comparative and stadial models of the Scottish Enlightenment. Yet in the ‘Essay on Chivalry’ Scott also claims that the romances of chivalry amount to a history of the period in which they were produced and argues that they are no less ‘truthful’ than other historical documents; and he maintains in his ‘Essay on Romance’ that romance and history have a common origin such that ‘graver historians quote the actions of the former in illustration of, and as corollary to, the real events which they narrate’.25 Scott goes on to explain why romance writers moved from a position of independence in primitive societies to a position of dependence and patronage in the Middle Ages. There is an overtly sociological drive to his criticism here as he explains the decline of the romance through an examination of changes in economic and social conditions, but he does not appear to see the genre as a lesser species of composition than history for the simple reason that its authors faithfully copied the manners of their time.26 When considering the historical drama in his ‘Essay on Drama’ (1819), on the other hand, he notes that the authors of these histories did not confine ‘themselves to the matter-of-fact contained in records. They speedily innovated or added to their dramatic chronicles, without regard to the real history.’ While one would expect censure for these additions of invention, Scott maintains instead that ‘[t]he dramatic chronicles … were a field in which the genius of the poet laboured to supply by character, sentiment, and incident, the meager detail of the historian’.27 The romance, originally a faithful copy of the manners of its time, has become a corrective to the cold, dry outlines of history. In a comparison of Scott and Smollett in early January 1818, Keats claims to prefer Smollett to ‘the whole Novel of the Antiquary’, alleging
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that Scott ‘endeavours to th[r]ow so interesting and ramantic a colouring into common and low Characters as to give them a touch of the Sublime’, whereas ‘Smollet on the contrary pulls down and levels what with other Men would continue Romance’ (LJK, I, 200). Keats may disapprovingly align Scott with ‘romance’ rather than with ‘history’ here, but by November of the same year he is willing to twice declare Scott one of the three literary kings of his time: ‘We have seen three literary kings in our Time— Scott—Byron—and then the scotch nove[ls]’ (LJK, II, 16). He tends to associate Godwin, on the other hand, with ‘consequitive reasoning’ (LJK, I, 397; II, 213) and in particular with his friend Dilke’s argument that human benevolence is based on reason rather than on affection: ‘Dilke will never come at truth as long as he lives; because he is always trying at it. He is a Godwin-methodist’ (LJK, II, 213). Keats’s view of Dilke is reminiscent of Hazlitt’s previously mentioned lecture ‘On the English Novelists’, in which Hazlitt argues that Godwin wrenches ‘the influence of reason or the understanding in moral questions and relations from that of habit, sense, association, local and personal attachment, natural affection, &c’. He also accuses Godwin of claiming that ‘abstract reason and general utility are the only test and standard of moral rectitude’ (HW, VI, 132).28 However, Hazlitt draws a distinction in this lecture between Godwin the ‘philosopher’ and Godwin the ‘romancer’, implying that his allegations of abstraction apply only to the former. In spite of Godwin’s waivering allegiance to philosophic rationalism and Scott’s ambivalent commitment to philosophic history, both writers attempt to assert the emotional relevance of the romance in their fiction and historiographical writing, and Godwin even boldly extends his increasingly sentimentalist agenda to quasi-historical genres in his Life of Chaucer. In Endymion Keats similarly attempts to extend to historical discourse a circulating idea relating to literary history: the development of English poetry from external and objective Miltonic modes to more internal and subjective Wordsworthian ones. He may declare the poet/conqueror an external man of action, ‘striving to uprear / Love’s standard on the battlements of song’ (II, 40–1), but the subject of his action is nonetheless the internal history of love, suffering and the human heart. Michael O’Neill has, however, astutely noted a paradox or tension in Keats’s argument in these lines, observing that the military nature of his metaphor takes its associations from ‘the universe of deeds’ and thus ‘implicitly acknowledges the force of a history it explicitly denies’.29 There is little doubt that Keats’s representation of history in the four inductions to Endymion marks a movement away from the public and social arena towards a more internal and privatised site of operation, but I wish to argue that there is a
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larger tension in the poem between the sentimental model of history explicitly established in the inductions and the implicitly sociological mode of the epic proper, which continues to draw on Enlightenment socialisation theories in its representation of the value of community, sympathy and friendship as well as on historiographical models in its trope of a gradual development by stages. Endymion can, moreover, be seen as a critical, transitional model or paradigmatic case for some of Keats’s later narrative poems, which are similarly marked by a tension between sociological and sentimental modes of representation. This chapter will examine the interaction between these different modes of representation in two poems which consider aspects of feudalism, chivalry and quest-romance – Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes – arguing that their endorsement of a history of feeling or of an essentially inward response to the scenes of history is nonetheless conducted within an Enlightenment framework of sociological development from rudeness to refinement and from feudal to civil society.
Enlightenment Socialisation Models and the ‘History of Stages’ in Endymion Most investigations of the relationship between Endymion and the Enlightenment have focused on the deism of the poem’s opening, arguing that the ‘Hymn to Pan’ is ‘a serious effort to imagine the “natural theology” of its “Greek” world’.30 Robert Ryan has demonstrated that Voltaire’s deism or natural religion was a major influence on Keats’s religious thought, and he and John Barnard have argued that the ‘Hymn to Pan’ can be read as a ‘displaced version’ of the Edenic myth.31 Like Voltaire, D’Holbach, Volney and other Enlightenment sceptical thinkers, Keats certainly uses Greek and Roman myths to question Christianity’s claims to an exclusive spiritual truth, but while the poem’s mythological setting appears to propose a joyful alternative to repressive politics and institutionalised Christianity, the ostensibly organic and natural world far away from ‘the city’s din’ (I, 40) in fact resembles, as Daniel Watkins has noted, the feudal world characterised by Voltaire, Robertson, Hume and Gibbon as an era of intellectual impoverishment and virtual slavery. There is ‘a multitude’ (I, 164), ‘a venerable priest’ (I, 149) and ‘a chieftain king[’s]’ (I, 172), who together amount to a ‘goodly company’ of ‘old piety’ (I, 129, 130).32 Watkins argues that these figures are suggestive of a feudal hierarchy from which Endymion feels increasingly estranged. He is described as living a kind of death-in-life (‘dead-still as a marble man’ (I, 405)) and has
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‘striven / To hide the cankering venom, that had riven / His fainting recollections’ (I, 395–7). On one level, his solitary state is a ‘fall’ from the plenitude and wholeness represented in the poem by the ‘Hymn to Pan’ into modern despondence, egotism and self-absorption, but the fissures in Endymion’s community are not simply defined by his own ‘cankering venom’: a more general and ambiguous sense of disquiet permeates the entire community.33 In spite of their initial joyousness, the Latmians are subsequently in ‘sad mood’ (I, 343) and the ‘companies’ (I, 313) dance to ‘tunes forgotten—out of memory’ (I, 316), suggesting that their celebration is for a way of life already under threat. They commemorate – and are commemorated as – an aestheticised past petrified ‘in old marbles ever beautiful’ (I, 319).34 These lines can, of course, be read more positively as ‘a vision that is at once retrospective and prospective, evoking a classical and mythic realm of “simple times” (I, 171) … as a model of how “better times” might be’.35 But when read in the context of the poem’s allusions to feudal decline the deep unease at the heart of the Latmian community is better characterised as disappointment or a disbelief in the possibility of a return to simple or better times. It is not so much that the Latmians represent a nostalgic lament for the past, but rather that as both frozen forms of a mythic age and remnants of a decaying feudal world they represent a double displacement from the present. Listening to tales in ‘quiet circles’ (I, 322) across the hillside, they grieve over ‘the sad death / of Hyacinthus’ (I, 327– 8) and the loneliness of Niobe ‘when her lovely young/ Were dead and gone’ (I, 339–40), not realising that history is displacement and that their own way of life is itself ‘the latter end / Of some strange history’ (I, 323– 4). If the opening ‘Hymn to Pan’ represents a ‘counter-world’ of organic community, the ‘sad mood’ of the Latmian multitude represents the decline and displacement of that world, first by feudal oppression and then by the ‘gloomy days’ (I, 9) of contemporary British politics.36 Materialist readings have accordingly emphasised the spiritual emptiness that characterises the Latmian community, arguing that Keats’s description of beauty in the beginning of the poem is founded on an escapist idealisation of the past. More traditional readings have also focused on the poem’s idealism and escapism, arguing that Keats explicitly expresses his desire to evade social reality in the famous speech on happiness and in particular in the so-called ‘pleasure thermometer’ passage (I, 777–842), which he describes in a letter of 30 January 1818 to his publisher, John Taylor, as ‘a regular stepping of the Imagination towards a Truth’ (LJK, I, 218). This passage is at the heart of neo-Platonic readings of the poem, and materialist and textual critics alike have tended to see it either as a ‘hedonistic hierarchy’ or as ‘an ideal possibility’:
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‘Opting for vision over reality, claiming that “listlessness” is potentially more fundamental and more liberating than social interest (“occasion”) Endymion places his “hope” (1, 857) in “love immortal” (1, 849).’37 Such readings neglect, however, to consider Endymion’s belief that listlessness may ‘bless / The world with benefits unknowingly’ (I, 826–7), suggesting that he has not abandoned his longing for the ‘world’s praises’ (I, 770), whatever the ‘tatter’d’ (I, 773) and ‘drifting’ (I, 774) nature of his goal. Certainly, his wandering is not the result of a ‘merely slumberous phantasm’ (I, 771) or a vision divorced from the greater good. Even while apparently revelling in ‘ardent listlessness’ (I, 825), Endymion expresses doubt as to whether his ‘restless spirit’ could ‘endure / To brood so long upon one luxury’ (I, 854–5) unless it saw a ‘hope beyond the shadow of a dream’ (I, 857). He may proclaim that ‘men, who might have tower’d in the van / Of all the congregated world’ (I, 817–18) have instead ‘been content to let occasion die, / Whilst they did sleep in love’s elysium’ (I, 822–3), but love and friendship also sit ‘high / Upon the forehead of humanity’ (I, 801–2) and can ‘our souls interknit’ (I, 812). Attachment to love does not, therefore, preclude social interaction; nor is it necessarily a space apart from social and historical processes.38 Keats’s letter to Reynolds of 19 February 1818, in which he argues that an ideal society is one where individuals are capable of various forms of ‘interassimulation’, is suggestive of his ongoing orientation towards ‘Cockney’ sociability rather than ‘Romantic’ isolation, whatever his feelings towards Hunt as an individual (LJK, I, 232; see also II, 208). Despite his disappearance with his immortal and the apparently escapist idealism of the ‘pleasure thermometer’ passage, Endymion is a community-seeker rather than a solitary, and it is on the nature and process of his socialisation that I wish to focus this discussion of the poem. Although somewhat preempted by Endymion’s response to the Alpheus and Arethusa myth in book two (II, 936–1017), it is the so-called ‘Glaucus episode’ in book three that most fully demonstrates the important social effects of friendship.39 Endymion travels under the sea and feels disillusioned by the wrecks of those very ‘goodly vessels’ that the narrator rejects in the induction to book two. He expresses a desire to abandon his quest, but subsequently meets Glaucus and is moved to sympathetic pity by his plight, which like that of Godwin’s St. Leon, Hyperion’s Saturn and Endymion himself is one of death-in-life. By freeing Glaucus from the chains of captivity, Endymion rejects individualism and isolationism – those ever-present and ‘deadly’ threats in Keats’s poems to true poethood (II, 284) – and prepares himself for his meeting with the Indian maid in book four, the symbol of human sorrow and suffering for whom, unlike Shelley’s Alastor, he is able to renounce immortal love.
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The episode is significant on a number of levels. First, as Vincent Newey reminds us, Glaucus is a kind of poet with his book, wand and cloak (III, 196–217), and his ‘symbiotic interdependence’ with Endymion suggest that he acts as a double for the poem’s hero; in other words, he is a mirror or reflection of Endymion’s own unsocial tendency towards solitude and solipsism.40 Glaucus’s original sin is one of isolationism, and the lonely nature of his former existence is not fundamentally different from his subsequent thousand-year captivity: ‘“I touch’d no lute, I sang not, trod no measures: / I was a lonely youth on desert shores. / My sports were lonely …”’ (III, 338–40). This existence is not unhappy – the ‘crown’ of Glaucus’s life is ‘utmost quietude’ (III, 352, 353) – but his desire for powers which overreach natural human capabilities (such as his wish to dwell on the ocean-bed) or which are unreciprocated (his love of Scylla) are at the heart of his later curse; and his isolation with Circe in her ‘flower’d Elysium’ (III, 428) is just another reflection of his essentially unsocial passions. A second and much remarked upon feature of the encounter between Glaucus and Endymion is their subsequent mutual restoration through sympathy and friendship. On hearing Glaucus’s tale, Endymion is able, for the first time, to fully and genuinely sympathise with another: ‘“Then,” cried the young Endymion, overjoy’d, / “We are twin brothers in this destiny!”’ (III, 712–13). The friendship between them, therefore, has the effect of restoring to life not just Glaucus, but also Endymion, who breaks his deathly passivity with real emotions of terror, sorrow and joy, representing a marked change from his earlier position in Latmian society where he lives in seclusion and is able to hear the sad tales of Niobe and Hyacinthus unmoved. Endymion’s reanimation through the private bond of friendship is usually seen either as part of Keats’s more general internalisation of the quest-romance or as the result of his continued allegiance to Hunt’s sociability model, but the critique of individualism inherent to the encounter with Glaucus has strong affinities with Scottish Enlightenment socialisation theories and their emphasis on sociological and intuitive, rather than rationalist and individualist, explanations of the way in which society functions. There is no evidence to suggest that Keats read Kames, Ferguson, Hume or Millar, but he was aware of the works of Adam Smith and those of his mentor, Francis Hutcheson, even if only indirectly through his reading of Benjamin Bailey’s ‘An Essay on the Moral Principle’ and Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action in Oxford in September 1817. The Scottish social theorists tended to reject both the ‘state of nature’ and ‘social contract’ explanations of society proposed by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, among others, in favour of the idea that humans are
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naturally social. Sociality is not, therefore, a question of reason, but rather of intuition and affection; and contractarianism is an insufficient explanatory model precisely because it is grounded in rational calculation. In his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), for example, Adam Ferguson stresses the importance of friendship, and in particular the non-instrumental quality of friendship, in the formation and development of civil society. Friendship is crucial to social refinement because it is neither the product of animal instinct (in the sense of maternal affection or other family ties) or of rational calculation, but rather the result of ‘resolute ardour’. For Smith, too, friendship is at the heart of social and moral development, although in The Theory of Moral Sentiments its centrality is partly due to the fact that it is impossible for a person to judge his own feelings in any meaningful way unless he sees them reflected in the mirror of another person.41 Smith considers in some detail the emotional interplay between friends, arguing that ‘[u]pon his [a friend’s] sympathy they [the person in distress] seem to disburthen themselves of a part of their distress: he is not improperly said to share it with them’ (Sentiments, p. 15). He also comments on the positive effect of sympathetic identification on the person who sympathises with another’s distress: ‘the pleasure which we find in the conversation of one whom in all the passions of his heart we can entirely sympathize with, seems to do more than compensate the painfulness of that sorrow with which the view of his situation affects us’ (p. 16). The effect of sympathy is not ultimately painful, whatever the strength of the passions involved; and Smith goes on to consider the role of strangers and friends in the process of sympathetic identification. Strangers are able to compose us more than friends, but the function of both is to teach the art of modulation (p. 23). Smith, in fact, sees friendship as the primary means of developing the more refined, modulated and softer virtues that are characteristic of civilised societies. In an uncivilised society men are unresponsive to the suffering of others and are accustomed to a very high degree of self-command, whereas a civilised person is able to adapt to a variety of moral circumstances, while still being open, frank, passionate and vivacious (pp. 205, 207). A little-noted but critical feature of the encounter between Glaucus and Endymion is the moderating effect they have on each other’s passions. When Glaucus first sees the knight his initial reaction is to indulge in the full force of compulsive emotion, echoed in the poem’s rapid and convulsive lines: ‘He rose: he grasp’d his stole, / With convuls’d clenches waving it abroad, / And in a voice of solemn joy, that aw’d / Echo into oblivion, he said:— / “Thou art the man!”’ (III, 230–4). The giddying rapture of his hypothetical freedom – ‘“What shall I do? Where go, / When
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I have cast this serpent-skin of woe?—”’ (III, 239–40) – elicits from Endymion not an accompanying sense of gladness, but immense distrust and dismay, culminating in a parallel list of hypothetical terrors and a resolve to attack and kill the old man: ‘“What lonely death am I to die / In this cold region?”’ (III, 258–9). However, Glaucus’s response to Endymion’s ‘high defiance’ is to weep, and the effect of his tears is to soften Endymion’s terror and anger: ‘Lo! his heart ’gan warm / With pity, for the grey-hair’d creature wept’ (III, 282–3). The stylistic archaism of these lines recalls Keats’s markings to Palmerin and The Faerie Queene, in which he highlights passages involving suffering, loss and sentiment. Here, too, Endymion feels Glaucus’s suffering at the heart and is soon ‘ripe for tears’ (III, 288). Moreover, as the ‘penitent shower’ falls, his sympathetic identification elicits an equally sympathetic response from Glaucus: ‘“I know thine inmost bosom, and I feel / A very brother’s yearning for thee steal / Into mind own”’ (III, 293–5). As the old man represents a kind of double or mirror in which the knight sees his own behaviour reflected, it is unsurprising that Glaucus’s liberation from captivity results in the subsequent reanimation of Endymion, but it is significant that Endymion’s actions also have the result of liberating and restoring Glaucus’s entire community: ‘Death fell a weeping in his charnel-house. / The Latmian persever’d along, and thus / All were re-animated’ (III, 788–90). The ‘noise of harmony, pulses and throes / Of gladness in the air’ (III, 791–2) directly parallels the depiction of the unhappy multitude dancing to forgotten tunes in book one of the poem, who are themselves subsequently reanimated: ‘they saw descending thick / Another multitude’ (III, 820–1). In presenting the ‘great enfranchisement’ of Glaucus and his wider community (III, 299), Keats not only refers to a topical sub-text, whereby Louis XVIII was associated with Circe, but also draws on the idea of liberty more generally.42 The ‘beautiful multitude’ (III, 818) is now free from slavery and oppression of various kinds, and is enlightened in the ways of love, beauty and interdependence. Although described in military terms – ‘the host / Mov’d on for many a league; and gain’d, and lost / Huge sea-marks; vanward swelling in array, / And from the rear diminishing away’ (III, 828–31) – the multitude is a republican army of lovers held together by the bands of love and affection; a vision of a grand society governed by the same spirit, moving as one and enjoying the felicity of which human nature is capable, preempting Keats’s own later image of a ‘grand democracy’ in his letter to Reynolds of 19 February 1818 (LJK, I, 232). Watkins maintains that Keats privatises the nature of friendship in this part of the poem to the extent that he elides the fact ‘that society itself is the necessary starting point for all human endeavour’, but the Glaucus
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episode in fact demonstrates that society is at the heart of all individual aspiration.43 As Watkins himself points out, the new social order in Endymion is founded not upon individual power (‘yet not exalt alone’) but rather upon love and beauty (III, 862–5), which are able to reanimate and liberate a simultaneously decaying and frozen community.44 Love and beauty do not represent private spaces apart from the social process, but are instead the bonds that unite the multitude in a far more convincing way than the feudal hierarchy in the beginning of the poem, proving the earlier claim that beauty can ‘bind us to the earth’ (I, 7). The emphasis in book three of the poem on social development through love and affection rather than through rational endeavour echoes Smith’s argument in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that ‘man, who can subsist only in society, was fitted by nature to that situation for which he was made. All members of human society stand in need of each others assistance … All the different members of it are bound together by the agreeable bands of love and affection, and are, as it were, drawn to one common centre of mutual good offices’ (p. 85). Keats’s ‘Smithian’ representation of the social benefits of friendship owes more to Enlightenment socialisation theories than it does to Romantic individualism; but Endymion’s animation of Glaucus and his wider community is itself embedded within a broader developmental narrative. As numerous commentators have pointed out, Endymion’s movement from dream-vision to experience, represented by his descent to the underworld in book two and beneath the sea in book three, is similar to the development from the infant chamber to the ‘Chamber of MaidenThought’ in Keats’s letter to Reynolds of 3 May 1818, in which he attempts to explain the gradual stages of personal development through ‘a simile of human life as far as I now perceive it’. His famous simile is, of course, a mansion made up of many apartments: Well—I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments … The first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think—We remain there a long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second Chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it; but are at length imperceptibly impelled by the awakening of the thinking principle—within us—we no sooner get into the second Chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of Maiden-Thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and atmosphere, we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in delight: However among the effects this breathing is father of is that tremendous one of sharpening one’s vision into the heart and nature of Man—of convincing ones nerves that the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression. (LJK, I, 280–1)45
Critics have tended to think of the ‘Mansion of Many Apartments’ letter
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and also the ‘vale of Soul-making’ letter of 21 April 1819 purely ‘as paradigms of personal growth’, forgetting that each ‘concludes with descriptions of larger historical and religious progress’.46 The passage is not, therefore, usually read in sociological or historiographical terms, being most often interpreted either as a comment on Keats’s personal literary development or as the beginning of a philosophy of benevolence that culminates in the ‘vale of Soul-making’ letter; but neither of these views prevents a broader, sociological reading.47 In relation to the first argument, the relationship between history and literature in the period was often understood in evolutionary rather than in generic or referential terms, and the idea that the difference between less and more mature writing lay in its original mode of consciousness is similar to Keats’s distinction between modes of consciousness in the image of the mansion itself. The argument that the letter marks the beginning of a Keatsian philosophy of human benevolence complements rather than contradicts a reading of the passage that emphasises the idea of progressive stages, and Keats’s growing awareness of the importance of a sympathetic identification with human suffering for personal, cultural and historical progress. Keats’s parallel argument in the same letter that Wordsworth has come further than Milton in exploring the dark passages of human life suggests that the personal movement from the first to the second chamber is echoed in the development of the species more generally: ‘Here I must think Wordsworth is deeper than Milton—though I think it has depended more upon the general and gregarious advance of intellect, than individual greatness of Mind’ (LJK, I, 281). In associating the development of the individual with that of society, Keats echoes the methodological individualism evident in the work of the Scottish Enlightenment social theorists themselves. Robertson notes in The History of America, for example, that ‘[a]s the individual advances from the ignorance and imbecility of the infant state, to vigour and maturity of understanding, something similar to this may be advanced in the progress of the species’ (I, 308).48 Keats’s infant or thoughtless chamber clearly corresponds to the first stages of society in which man wanders unthinkingly in solitary isolation. Volney describes the original state of man in his widely read Ruins: or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires (1791): In the origin of things, man, formed equally naked both as to body and mind, found himself thrown by chance upon a land confused and savage … Like other animals, without experience of the past, without knowledge of the future, he wandered in forests guided and governed purely by the affections of his nature. (Ruins, p. 38) 49
As mankind progresses, the impressions he receives from external objects ‘awakening his faculties’ develops ‘by degrees his understanding’ and
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begins ‘to instruct his profound ignorance’ (p. 39). Thus, man stays in a barbaric and thoughtless state for some time, but is gradually and ‘imperceptibly impelled’ towards the next stage of development ‘by the awakening of the thinking principle’. The ‘bright appearance’ and ‘light and atmosphere’ of Keats’s second chamber represents something similar to this thinking principle: as ‘the minds of men have sympathised, their hearts have enlarged; we have seen agreement in thinking, and concord in acting … hence has the atmosphere of truth continually grown brighter’ (Ruins, pp. 112–13). Although Keats is less optimistic than Volney about the continual progress or perfectibility of mankind, he offers us in Endymion a pilgrim figure from other lands who wanders not only across different geographical regions, but also across the ruins of various civilisations and societal stages. His journey is most explicitly situated within the wider context of social development in book three of the poem when he passes ‘Old rusted anchors, helmets, breast-plates large / Of gone sea-warriors; brazen beaks and targe; / Rudders that for a hundred years had lost / The sway of human hand’ (III, 123–6). Keats writes with an antiquarian’s touch here: the helmets and breastplates of ‘gone sea-warriors’ are relics of past lives and times. Some are only a hundred years old but the ‘mouldering scrolls, / Writ in the tongue of heaven’ (III, 129–30) were written by men in the early stages of religious and social development; and the skeletons of man, beast, behemoth and nameless monsters (III, 133–6) conjure up an even more ancient, primeval world before the advent of human records. The mouldering decay of time reduces Endymion, as it does Volney’s pilgrim, to ‘cold leaden awe’ and the painful ‘heaviness’ of death (III, 136, 138). He shrinks at the knowledge that glory can be eclipsed and that the works of men can perish as nations and empires decline, but he must pass these first stages of human and poetic development in order to be united with his immortal love. The intoxicating light and bliss associated with the ‘pleasure thermometer’ passage, with its combination of sensory imagery and etherialised abstraction, is therefore replaced in books two and three by an awareness of the grief, loss and anxiety that is recurrent in human history. At key moments in his journey, Endymion recognises the truth about human life, and Keats’s primary argument seems to be that the ideal is attainable only after a full acceptance of the real: 50 But this is human life: the war, the deeds, The disappointment, the anxiety, Imagination’s struggles, far and nigh, All human; bearing in themselves this good, That they are still the air, the subtle food,
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John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment To make us feel existence, and to shew How quiet death is. (II, 153–9)
This depiction of negative or difficult human experiences comes to an abrupt halt at ‘All human’, emphasising the fact that humanity and an understanding of mortality are paradoxically essential to Endymion’s quest for immortality, and bringing to mind Keats’s comment in his letter to Reynolds on the ‘Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression’ that seems to exist at all stages of human development (LJK, I, 281). Endymion may vanish with his goddess, but he must first renounce her for the sorrowing Indian maid, and the poem is not so much about the final accomplishment of his immortality as the complex process by which the individual and society are tentatively able to progress from a state of isolated rudeness to social refinement. The opening characterisation of Endymion as a ‘marble man’ and his isolation from the rest of his society establish his original state as one of primitive self-interest and individualism. It is only by losing his own identity and identifying with the suffering of others – in the poem, the suffering of Glaucus and the sorrow of the Indian Maid – that he can see into the heart of things (IV, 475–7). However, his ability to imaginatively identify with Glaucus’s situation is the product not only of his personal development, but also of social and historical development more generally. It signals his and mankind’s progression from the primitive state of mind associated with the pagan ‘Hymn to Pan’ and the anachronistically feudal multitude towards a more cultivated and sympathetic state of friendship associated with civil society. Endymion’s personal journey, therefore, reflects a wider journey from ignorance to knowledge as Keats follows the hypothetical developmental model of the French and Scottish Enlightenments.
Feudalism and Civil Society in The Eve of St. Agnes Just as ‘pageant history’ is rejected in book two of Endymion, in The Eve of St. Agnes the narrator wishes away the ‘snarling trumpets’ (31) and ‘argent revelry’ (37) of the public arena to turn ‘sole-thoughted’ (42) to a single lady. The poem’s explicit focus is not, therefore, on public scenes of action, but on the more private visions of delight associated with the legend of St. Agnes as Keats invests in an ‘Imogen’ or internal heroine of feeling (LJK, I, 387). Madeline is seemingly oblivious to the outward manifestations of society: she ‘s[ees] not’ (62) the ‘amorous cavalier’ (60) and ‘sighs’ amid ‘the throng’d resort’ (66, 67), existing instead in a heightened state of ‘vague’ and ‘regardless’ eyes (64). The emphasis throughout
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the poem on impaired sight, as well as the ambiguous references to dreaming and waking, suggest that she is in a half-conscious state of reverie or ‘wakeful swoon’ (236). She is also described as being ‘Hoodwink’d with faery fancy’ (70), an appellation that has led to readings of the poem that emphasise the illusory nature of visionary experience. However, the syntactical ambiguity of lines 66–70, in which the reader is unsure whether the object of the hoodwinking is the heroine or her wider community, suggests that the public world operates in the poem in much the same way as the ‘multitude’ does in book one of Endymion. The ‘unreality’, insubstantiality and collective spiritual emptiness that characterises the group – ‘Numerous as shadows haunting fairily’ (39) – is presented in opposition to the private world of the ‘heart’: ‘Love’s fev’rous citadel’ (84). This recurrent ambiguity between vision and reality is, however, only one of the poem’s many elusive qualities. Numerous commentators have noted that the diegesis of The Eve is difficult and ill defined; and the poem’s movement from an ‘associative’ logic – or what Marjorie Levinson has called an ‘image logic’ – to narrative representation has troubled generations of critics.51 I wish to argue that the tension in the poem between ‘associative’ and ‘narrative’ representation can more profitably be understood in historiographical terms as a tension between Keats’s deployment of Enlightenment sociological frameworks and emerging representative techniques relating to sentimental history, in particular the idea of historical evocation. I am not, of course, the first person to point out that The Eve is structured around a sociological and developmental framework, and that it is part of a wider and historically related ‘desire to understand a world that had been destroyed and then replaced’.52 Its historical contexts and sources have been well documented, and rather than approaching various historical texts as possible source materials for the poem and therefore treading ground already covered by Watkins and, to a lesser extent, Chandler, I wish to focus this brief discussion on the various representative techniques that Keats uses to reconstruct the Middle Ages for his readers, and on the way in which those techniques interact with the poem’s larger theme: the development from feudal to civil society. The recurrent references to age and death in the first four stanzas of the poem make it clear that we are being presented with the ‘Rough ashes’ (26) of an historical moment that has passed. The ‘sculptur’d dead’ (14) and ‘carved angels’ (34) in the chapel mark physically the sense of distance between the medieval world and that of the reader, their frozen and staring forms, ‘Emprison’d in black, purgatorial rails’ (15), interning an historical moment equally frozen in time. Miriam Allott has pointed out that the
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reference to the Beadsman’s ‘frosted breath’ (6) rising in the air resembles pictures of the spirit leaving the body of a dying man, and the emphasis not only on the extreme necessity but also on the belatedness of his prayers – ‘already had his deathbell rung’ (22) – suggests that he is not so much a representative of the Middle Ages as a reminder of its passing. For his rendition of the Beadsman, Keats turned primarily to The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), in which Scott similarly emphasises the hardships that the Minstrel faces (‘The way was long, the wind was cold’ (I, 1)) as well as his extreme age and infirmity: ‘The Minstrel was infirm and old; / His withered cheek, and tresses gray, / Seemed to have known a better day’ (I, 2–4). As the last of his race, the Minstrel, too, is the ‘neglected and oppressed’ (I, 10) symbol of a nearly forgotten world.53 In his largely favourable review of Scott’s poem in the Edinburgh Review for 1805, Francis Jeffrey thought that it demonstrated admirably the passing of time and old customs; and Keats’s own attempt to write a ballad along the lines of Scott, Old Meg she was a gipsey, similarly refers to a lost world of antique customs and values.54 Meg is as ‘brave as Margaret Queen / And tall as Amazon’ (25–6), but like her simple and wholesome way of life – ‘Her bed it was the brown heath turf, / And her house was out of doors’ (3–4) – she is no more: ‘God rest her aged bones somewhere— / She died full long agone!’ (29–30).55 This distancing act at the end of the poem is a common feature of medieval and Elizabethan ballads, but here it also serves to accentuate a commemorative tone, creating a shift in perspective from the historical past to the historical present. In the concluding lines of The Eve, Keats employs a similar device – ‘And they are gone: ay, ages long ago’ (370) – and the Beadsman’s progress ‘along the chapel aisle by slow degrees’ (13) can, in retrospect, be seen as a fleeting commemorative walk through a lost world. The historical moment in which his prayer takes place is accordingly reactualised for the reader through a series of sensory and pictorial images: the night is one of ‘bitter chill’ (1); the Beadsman’s breath is ‘frosted’ (6); the knights ‘ache in icy hoods and mails’ (18); and even the owl ‘for all his feathers’ is ‘a-cold’ (2). The opening stanzas of the poem invite the reader to participate in a scene that is essentially sensorial and spectatorial, suggesting that, for Keats, history is not merely a story to be narrated, but also an experience to be evoked in affective terms. Each of the sensory references combines to present history in a way that can be reanimated by the reader-spectator and the evocation of the emotional associations of the Middle Ages intensifies the reader’s sense of an immediate engagement with the historical experience.56 As the Beadsman passes along the chapel we achieve a personal insight into the medieval world very different to the tales of chivalry and jousting in the 1817 Poems.
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Every inhabitant of this world is suffering, from the animals to the lowly Beadsman to the aristocratic knights and ladies, but the sense of extreme deprivation is not only physical. The Beadsman is ‘weak’ in spirit (17) and his is the ‘harsh penance’ (24) of a servant praying for his betters, that glittering world of ‘rich array’ which intrudes on his prayers later in the poem. The pun on ‘freeze’ and ‘frieze’ in line 14 is, therefore, on one level, suggestive of the failure of spiritual fulfilment, but it also has another meaning.57 It is art and culture itself that has been frozen by the feudal system, along with the spirit of independence, equality and pride that Robertson argues characterised the Roman Empire before its corruption and fall: But these [the virtues of the human mind] are all the offspring of equality and independence, both which the feudal institutions had destroyed. The spirit of domination corrupted the nobles; the yoke of servitude depressed the people; the generous sentiments inspired by a sense of equality were extinguished, and nothing remained to be a check on ferocity and violence. (Charles V, I, 20)
Robertson represents feudalism as destructive, not only of the social order but also of society’s collective spiritual, moral and intellectual development. Life in feudal Europe is bloody, violent and primitive; the administration of justice is greatly inhibited by the emergence of powerful barons, and disorder of all kinds prevails to a degree ‘scarce compatible with the subsistence of civil society’ (History of Scotland, I, 17). Each of the representative traits Robertson ascribes to feudalism is apparent in Keats’s Middle Ages: inequality and dependence characterise the status of the Beadsman; the ‘argent revelry’ are corrupted by the trappings of wealth and power; and the inhabitants of the castle are ferocious and violent. ‘[D]warfish Hildebrand’ (100) and ‘old Lord Maurice’ (103) are the fierce and primitive ancestors of modern Britain (‘the whole blood-thirsty race!’ (99)), and the emphasis on the sensorial manifestations of the social order represented by the (particularly male) members of society (‘fever’, ‘fit’, ‘burning’ (101, 159)) connects the feudal system with a perceptive state that is founded on barbarism, violence and ignorance: ‘those chambers held barbarian hordes, / Hyena foemen, and hot-blooded lords’ (85–6).58 The poem’s castle in particular encapsulates the Enlightenment association of the Middle Ages with tyranny and licentiousness. Like the chapel, the castle is an obvious site for historical sentiment, being akin to one of those places William Gilpin mentions in his Observations on the River Wye (1782) which, like ruined abbeys and scenes of battle or sieges, operate like an enchantment on the mind. But despite Keats’s attraction to medieval literature and architecture, and the castle’s intermittently romantic appeal – ‘A casement high and triple-
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arch’d there was, / All garlanded with carven imag’ries / Of fruits, and flowers’ (208–10) – it is also described as ‘foul’ (89), ‘Pale, lattic’d, chill, and silent as a tomb’ (113) and ‘blush’d with blood of queens and kings’ (216).59 The Eve is not, therefore, simply a sentimental idyll or sensory poempicture. As in Isabella, the medieval world Keats portrays is a site of crisis and decay, but unlike Isabella which, as we shall see, is primarily concerned to invoke the contemporary resonances of its fifteenth-century setting, The Eve is more historically situated.60 The opening stanzas of the poem may be pictorial and sensorial in orientation, but they also recall in affective terms the superstition, violence and universal anarchy that Voltaire, Robertson, Hume, Gibbon and Mavor agree descended over Europe after the fall of Rome. Porphyro, too, is implicated in the violence and bloodthirstiness that characterise the period. The reference to his ‘burning’ with a ‘ruffian passion’ (149) and the martial imagery surrounding his entry into the castle suggests that his understanding of love is bound up with the idea of conquest: ‘He ventures in: let no buzz’d whisper tell: / All eyes be muffled, or a hundred swords / Will storm his heart … ’ (82–4). The ambivalent nature of Porphyro’s characterisation as seducer, strategist and ideological invader has been well documented and I have no quarrel with these arguments, apart from seeing in him some of the more positive qualities that Robertson, Warton and others associate with the chivalric knight; but I do wish to question the apparently consequential contention that Madeline, like the ‘poor cheated’ Bertha (69) in The Eve of St. Mark, is the victim of Porphyro’s deceptive practices, as well as of her own superstitions and visionary experiences. Elizabeth Bronfen, for example, emphasises her passivity and vulnerability, suggesting that the poem’s masquerade is an aesthetic allegory of death, while Jack Stillinger has read its sexual politics as suggestive of her rape.61 One assumption of these arguments is that Madeline’s visions are divorced from reality and that the poem eventually rejects her visionary delusions for the more realistic perspective occasioned by waking. Another assumption is that, in Madeline, Keats presents a hoodwinked and superstitious dreamer overcome by ‘the pious frauds of Religion’ (LJK, II, 80). It is possible that Madeline’s hoodwinking and the portrayal of the ritualistic and pious Beadsman praying for redemption betray traces of anti-Catholic sentiment.62 A letter to Fanny Brawne dated 13 October 1819 indicates that Keats was not sympathetic either to the ‘pious frauds’ of religion or to Catholic excesses: he confesses that he was once ‘astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion—I have shudder’d at it’ (LJK, II, 223). In an earlier letter to his brother Tom dated 3–9 July 1818, however, he praises the largely Catholic Ireland for its cheerfulness,
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while bemoaning ‘the horrible dominion of the Scotch kirk’: ‘These kirkmen have done Scotland harm—they have banished puns and laughing and kissing’ (LJK, I, 319). Keats was certainly opposed to superstitious practices and rituals, but the visions of delight connected with the legend of St. Agnes are not presented in a predominantly negative light and, in fact, form part of a more positive discourse that is centred on the ‘secret sisterhood’ (116) and collective female memory.63 Madeline’s visionary state is not a situation of spiritual isolation; nor is it presented as an unpleasant superstitious ritual in the same way as Isabella’s digging of Lorenzo’s grave or obsession with her pot of basil. Madeline’s general stupor, her ‘vague, regardless eyes’ and ‘fancy’ suggest instead that her understanding is based on an almost intuitive perception of the world around her: she exists in an empirical world of physical ‘sensations’ rather than conscious ‘thoughts’. Keats remarks in a letter to his brother and sister-in-law in 1819 that the visionary state of reverie ‘is a rare instance of advantage in the body overpowering the Mind’ (LJK, II, 79), and both Madeline’s dream vision and state of ‘waking dream’ correspond in many ways to Hazlitt’s theory on the heightened perception occasioned by sleep and dream in his essay ‘On Dreams’, later published in The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men and Things (1826). Hazlitt distinguishes, for example, between the state of the human mind in sleep and the regular state of the mind: in sleep the ‘stupor is general … whatever ideas we have … float at random from object to object, from one class of impressions to another, without coherence or control’.64 He goes on to connect sleep with unconscious thought processes; not only may we discover our ‘almost unconscious sentiments with respect to persons or things’, but there exists in the state of sleep ‘a continual phantasmagoria: whatever shapes and colours come together are by the heat and violence of the brain referred to external nature, without regard to the order of time, place, or circumstance’ (HW, XII, 21). Although he argues in his Essay on the Principles of Human Action that conscious thought is not reducible to a regular, local arrangement of ideas (HW, I, 60), Hazlitt distinguishes conscious thought from the ‘continual phantasmagoria’ associated with sleep and dreams: ‘The vividness of our impressions in dreams, of which so much has been said, seems to be rather apparent than real; or, if this mode of expression should be objected to as unwarrantable, rather physical than mental.’ In sleep, therefore, ‘the voluntary power is suspended, and things come upon us as unexpected revelations, which we keep out of our thoughts at other times’ (HW, XII, 22–3). In a movement that reverses the original transition in the poem from image logic to narrative, the tale of Madeline and Porphyro reverts to
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visions of ‘pale enchantment’ (169) when in stanza 19 Porphyro takes his place in the ‘closet, of such privacy’ (165). Watching Madeline sleep, he becomes unconsciously ‘entoiled’ in ‘woofed phantasies’ (288) and eventually melts into her dream in a form of sympathetic identification. The conflation of Madeline, Porphyro and the narrator as dreaming subjects – Porphyro watches Madeline as she conjures him, even as the narrator conjures her act of conjuring – adds to the confusion of the reader’s tracking of subject and object. Place and action become ‘entoiled’ in Madeline’s dream, so that Porphyro’s actions, the narrator’s description of the dream and her own visions are virtually indistinguishable. Sleep, it seems, is ‘[m]ore full of visions than a high romance’ (Sleep and Poetry, 10) and it is clearly crucial to imaginative understanding and the creative process. The passage also, however, hints at the importance of dreams in revealing truth. Porphyro melts into Madeline’s dream and by his presence in the chamber she awakes to literally find her dream true, recalling Keats’s reflections on Adam’s dream and his argument about the role of the imagination in unconsciously anticipating ideas of our future selves: ‘The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth’ (LJK, I, 185). Like Adam’s dream, Madeline’s visions prefigure ‘truth’ through revelation. If Porphyro can be seen as the invader or force of change that disrupts the feudal world in which Madeline resides, it is Madeline who represents the means by which that change can be understood. Her maidenhood, state of sensation and the description of the castle as a ‘mansion’ are all reminiscent of Keats’s ‘Chamber of Maiden-Thought’ in which we initially ‘become intoxicated with the light and atmosphere, we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in delight’ (LJK, I, 281). However, even in her state of reverie or ‘waking dream’, Madeline is described as ‘thoughtful’ (55), ‘[a]nxious’ (65) and ‘perplexed’ (236); and in spite of her ‘vague’ and ‘regardless’ (64) response to public life, she nonetheless struggles to understand the meaning of her condition. Like Keats’s description of his second chamber, her intoxicating vision of ‘light and atmosphere’ quickly gives way to the darker realities of an icy storm. Porphyro tells her that ‘“This is no dream, my bride, my Madeline!”’ (326) and once she is fully awake, she feels like ‘“A dove forlorn and lost with sick, unpruned wing”’ (333). The ‘painful change’ (300) occasioned by Madeline’s awakening is usually seen as a rejection of physical and involuntary experience, but it is, in fact, more suggestive of Hazlitt’s idea of the vividness of unconscious recollection. The ‘witless words’ (303) that she ‘moan[s] forth’ (304) correspond with his idea in ‘On Dreams’ that ‘[t]here is … a sort of profundity in sleep; and it may usefully be consulted as an oracle in this
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way’ (HW, XII, 22–3). Both in her state of ‘waking dream’ and upon waking Madeline is wholly receptive to the ‘higher and more abstract sphere of thought’ that Hazlitt describes. She may become aware of the suffering and oppression that accompany human existence, but this does not negate the value of visionary experience, which is central to both her capacity for sympathetic understanding and to her escape from the castle. It is her visionary sensibility that cannot only offer ‘visions of delight’ (47), but that also understands how ‘necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul’ (LJK, II, 102). The painful reality of waking does not, therefore, so much eclipse the truth of visionary experience as give it new meaning. The narrator distances himself from Madeline’s and Porphyro’s escape at the end of the poem: not only does he employ the distancing device of the medieval romance, but the lovers also glide away from the decaying castle ‘like phantoms’ (361). The decline of the feudal world is clearly evident in the decay or death of the inhabitants left behind, but as Chandler points out, there is also an obvious shift from a past perspective to a perspective in the present: ‘Keats makes this final stanza a mark of his developmental “superiority” to the cultural state or stage epitomized by the diegetic content of the “old romance” presented in The Eve of St. Agnes.’ Chandler reads the shift from past to present as a comment on Keats’s personal and literary development, but through Madeline’s and Porphyro’s escape from the castle, Keats also demonstrates the progress of the human mind from dependence, servitude and superstition towards a more cultivated understanding associated with the emergence of civil society. Madeline and Porphyro are only able to flee the feudal multitude because of their higher-order perception, and the poem thereby offers an act of historiography on the development of intellectual history; that is, mankind’s development from a limited perception characterised by the primitive violence of the feudal world to the kind of visionary, humane and sympathetic understanding to which Keats himself aspired. It is not so much that the poem is an allegory of human development – its ambivalent sexual dimension and semantic instability certainly resist any such categorisation – but rather that the sociological nature of its over-arching developmental model offers a broader interpretive framework in which such instability can be understood.65 In both Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes Keats presents aspects of sentimentalist historiography – interiority, privatisation, historical evocation – within the framework of a staged sense of developmental progression. In Endymion he rejects the public and martial history of action for the history of feeling, but the hero’s isolating quest for immortal love is nonetheless qualified by Enlightenment principles of socialisation
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and Endymion’s private journey has important social implications: the poem not only traces the developmental steps leading the solipstistic mind towards sympathetic imagination, but also redefines the poet’s quest as one which is social in its orientation. His sympathy with the sufferings of others is essential for his final assumption of poethood and godhead; and tellingly, his personal quest does not just benefit himself but results in the reanimation of his entire community through the intuitive bonds of love, beauty and affection. Keats’s argument that to love and admire beauty is advantageous to civic virtue is similar to Smith’s argument that beauty is inherently oriented towards civility and social cohesion. The Glaucus scene in particular depicts the public implications of friendship, suggesting that Endymion’s understanding of love and friendship in book one does not entail his isolation from society, but rather involves a reconstruction of the values that constitute society. In The Eve the same tension exists between a sentimentalist desire to evoke the lived experience of history, and Keats’s attempt to present the wider historiographical implications of the demise of one historical order and its replacement by another. Through Madeline’s reverie, Keats offers a theory of human development from the infant and maiden chambers to a darker and more mysterious stage. As in Endymion, Sleep and Poetry and I stood tip-toe, the poet’s development is a movement from the stage of ‘Flora, and old Pan’ towards ‘a nobler life’ (Sleep and Poetry, 102, 123) and a more refined sense of understanding, echoing Wordsworth’s development in Keats’s 3 May 1818 letter to Reynolds. But like Endymion, The Eve also has a wider sociological significance, presenting the demise of feudalism and its replacement by civil society as well as reconstructing the development of human understanding from barbarism and ignorance to (relative) refinement. As we shall see, Keats explores the same tension between sentimental and developmental frameworks in some of his other poems, in particular Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. The inherently sociological orientation of Endymion and The Eve is made explicit in the Hyperion poems, which dramatise the encounter between the Titans and the Olympians as an anthropological clash between two different societal stages, although in both cases this narrative of human development is somewhat compromised by Keats’s inability or disinclination to finish the poems.
Chapter 3
The Science of Man: Anthropological Speculation and Stadial Theory in Hyperion
Several months passed between the composition of Hyperion and its revision as The Fall of Hyperion. Keats began to write Hyperion in February 1818, only to discard it in frustration in April 1819; and it was not until July 1819 that he started to work on The Fall.1 During the period between the two poems, he revealed in a letter to his brother and sisterin-law in America that he was ‘reading lately two very different books Robertson’s America and Voltaire’s Siecle De Louis xiv’, an experience that he playfully describes as ‘like walking arm and arm between Pizarro and the great-little Monarch’ (LJK, II, 100). Keats’s reading of the two histories in May 1819 occurred some weeks after he had abandoned Hyperion, but significantly, it was a rereading of texts already familiar to him from his schooldays and the period of his medical apprenticeship from 1810 to 1815; and following Hazlitt’s endorsement of Gibbon and Voltaire in his 17 February 1818 lecture at the Surrey Institute, he had also previously read (or possibly even reread) Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1776–88) as part of his preparation for Hyperion (LJK, I, 237).2 Whether or not Keats was aware of the methodological and philosophical continuities in the historical writing of Robertson and Voltaire, in particular their shared but frequently troubled belief in the viability of an enlightened, commercial Europe, is a matter of some speculation: he implies in his letter to America that he was reading the two histories simultaneously, and his later comment on the suffering that exists ‘in both instances’ suggests that he was not reading them in mutually exclusive terms (LJK, II, 100–1); but the image of himself, the Spanish conquistador Pizarro and Louis XIV walking ‘arm and arm’ evokes, in any event, an undeniable sense of his intimacy with, and enjoyment of, at least two of the most influential texts in Enlightenment and Romantic-era historiography.3 Robertson’s History of America may well have been of particular
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interest for Keats. His brother George had emigrated to America in 1818 after reading Morris Birkbeck’s popular Letters from Illinois (1818),4 and Keats would have been aware that Robertson’s history of South America was to have had a North American counterpart, as part of the latter appeared posthumously as books nine and ten of editions published after 1796.5 The spirit of inquiry and curiosity about America in his journal letters of the period is certainly suggestive of the argument that he was rereading the history in May 1819 in order to find out more about the conditions in which his brother lived; but in the case of the Hyperion poems, as elsewhere, Robertson’s history has never received the recognition it deserves ‘as a significant intellectual and imaginative resource for British writers of the Romantic period’.6 While it has been identified as an important source for On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer and for the discussions of historical progress in Keats’s letters, few critics have considered it, or any of the other Enlightenment texts that Keats reread between 1818 and 1819, as likely sources for his representation of historical and cultural displacement in Hyperion or The Fall; nor have they sought to place the acknowledged sense of historical suffering in the poems within a developed historiographical context.7 Hyperion is nonetheless heavily influenced by French and Scottish Enlightenment anthropological speculation about the origins and development of mankind, and is formally structured around the dual tropes of the ‘primitive encounter’ and the ‘history of stages’: the Titans and the Olympians encounter each other at diverse stages of cultural and social maturity, and the poem, in effect, dramatises the development of mankind from nascent to cultivated reasoning presented in narrative and stadial terms in Robertson’s History of America and more theoretically in Voltaire’s La Philosophie de l’histoire (a version of which was prefaced to Keats’s copy of the Essai sur les mœurs).8 The Fall is discussed separately in Chapter 5, but it too draws on Enlightenment models of stadial and conjectural history, as well as on circulating theories of moral philosophy, in order to represent the progress of mankind from primitive self-interest to a more refined and sympathetic understanding. Yet despite their Enlightenment structural frameworks, more than one critic has pointed out that the Hyperion poems offer ostensibly conflicted responses to their mythic subject matter, evincing an uneasy tension between their apparent assumption of a human history characterised by continuous progress and Keats’s desire to revise and reformulate it, a tension that is evident in the difficulties he had in completing the poems and in the unusually large amount of preparatory reading he undertook before and during their composition. I wish to demonstrate that far from involving a wholesale rejection or revision of their sources, the tension
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between competing stadial and sympathetic modes of representation in the Hyperion poems informs much historical writing of the mid- to late Enlightenment. Robertson’s and Voltaire’s histories repeatedly undermine their own assumptions about the possibility of causal and progressive explanation; and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall increasingly gives in to the pressures of sympathy, awe and wonder at the intricacies of the historical past. A fuller understanding of the complex nature of Enlightenment historiography can therefore assist us in resolving some of Hyperion’s outstanding interpretive and critical issues; in particular, the reasons behind Keats’s inability to complete the poem and his abandonment of the Hyperion project more generally.
‘A race of monkies’: Robertson, Stadial Theory and the Native American Indians William Robertson was among the Scottish Enlightenment social theorists who maintained that man’s historical development was stadial rather than linear, and that the earliest stages of human society could best be illuminated through a comparison with contemporary ‘savages’ such as the American Indians who were seen as living examples of primitive man.9 Although America itself had long been the model for such comparisons following Locke’s argument in his Two Treatises of Government (1689– 90) that ‘in the beginning all the world was America’, it was not until the eighteenth century that this kind of historical thinking was given a quasiempirical basis and referred to as comparative and/or conjectural history: when historical evidence and the example of contemporary primitive societies was insufficient, the Scots were able to overcome evidenciary deficiencies by way of ‘conjectural’ or hypothetical reconstruction.10 Stadial theory can most simply be described as ‘a natural trajectory or spiral of development in which societies undergo change through successive stages based on different forms of subsistence’. However, one of its distinguishing features is the more complicated idea of ‘uneven development’, which suggests that societies or nations can exist in states or modes of subsistence that belong simultaneously to two different ‘orders of temporality’.11 The four basic stages or modes of subsistence were hunting, pasturage, farming and commerce, but of the Scottish Enlightenment social theorists, only Kames, Smith and Millar strictly followed this taxonomy.12 While various arguments have been made as to whether or not the Scots considered human development to be continuously progressive, it is generally agreed that they did not see cultural and historical improvement as occurring evenly or uniformly within each
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stage of evolution, and that they saw social development as a mixed blessing.13 Robertson himself has been described as a ‘reluctant’ stadial historian, having had difficulty reconciling stadial theory with his belief in providentialism and employing it only in The History of America, which is nonetheless also a narrative history of Columbus’s discovery of America and the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru. In Robertson’s text, stadial theory competes with the demands of narrative history, whereas in the work of other Scottish social theorists such as Kames, Smith and Millar it is primarily a means of uncovering the underlying principles of natural law. As Karen O’Brien has demonstrated, by placing his stadial analysis of the Native Americans within a narrative structure, Robertson is able to make ‘the connection between stadial evolution and his idea of qualitative moral change’ more explicit than the rest of the Scots, who are less concerned with moral judgement than with the measurement and comparison of uneven stages of social development.14 Robertson’s attitude towards the Americas has accordingly been seen as one of European intellectual, physical and moral superiority; and his representation of the native has even been compared to Voltaire’s idea of barbarism as a kind of moral inferiority.15 But as J. H. Brumfitt has pointed out, Voltaire’s view of barbarism is itself a complicated one: on the one hand, in La Philosophie he uses the savage to expose the absurdities of European society; on the other, he repeatedly privileges civilisation over savagery (Essai, I, 22–8).16 Robertson, too, sometimes upholds the superiority of an enlightened, commercial Europe, while at other times undermining suggestions of an orderly historical progression by depicting the barbarism and brutal greed of the Spanish conquerors. More recently, some historians have questioned Robertson’s apparent Eurocentrism and antipathy towards the American Indians by emphasising his anti-imperial orientation.17 The stadial sections of The History of America certainly compare native societies to European standards of social organisation, but in the narrative histories of South and North America there are elements of disjunction between the colonial history that Robertson would like to be able to tell and that history as it actually emerges. The supposedly civilised Spaniards act barbarously and irresponsibly, and even the unfinished North American section of the book has similarities with his portrayal of the aggressive and exploitative Spanish colonies in South America. In Virginia, for example, the progress of the settlement is undermined by gold-digging and the use of slave labour.18 Quite apart from Robertson’s history, Keats would have been aware of the human and economic degradations that accompanied the Spanish colonisation of South America from his reading of Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs, Marmontel’s Incas: Or, the Destruction of the Empire of Peru
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(1777) and, more contemporaneously, from Leigh Hunt’s Examiner.19 Spanish rule in the New World was largely replaced by independent states by the mid-1820s, but the Spanish colonies acquired a topicality in 1817– 18 because of Ferdinand’s refusal to grant autonomy to the remaining South American colonies after declarations of independence by Uruguay and Chile in 1814 and 1816, respectively.20 In an article on South American independence in the Examiner for 31 August 1817, Hunt outlines the historical background of Spanish sovereignty in the region in ways that are reminiscent of its depiction in Robertson’s history, focusing on the political slavery, corruption, ‘rapacity and oppression’ that accompanied the Spanish settlement: ‘The Americans were compelled to purchase justice, or to procure it by personal humiliation, and all the arts which slaves employ to work upon their masters.’ In addition to this state of political ignominy, he describes the monopolies on trade and the prohibitions on industries (such as quicksilver mining and the growth of hemp) which were established by the Spanish in order to prevent the independence of the colonies, noting that ‘the restrictions on their trade and industry were scarcely less grievous. The convenience of all the inhabitants of that great continent were sacrificed to the convenience of the smallest portion of the inhabitants of Spain’ (31 August 1817, p. 547). Hunt’s article emphasises the effects of European greed and an advanced system of commerce on both the colonial settlers and the natives of South America who, as he points out, were commonly characterised as little more than ‘a race of monkies, filled with vice and ignorance, and unworthy of representing or being represented’ (p. 547). In The History of America, Robertson also describes the effect on the colonies of a sophisticated but exploitative European government. The Spanish state abuses its colonial market through monopolies, heavy taxation and trade embargos (II, 364–6), all of which are suggestive of the inflexibility of ‘feudal jurisprudence’ (II, 364).21 Hunt similarly portrays the South American colonies as representative of the worst characteristics of the feudal stage in an article in the Examiner for 2 August 1818, although he also notes ‘the rapid progress of their revolution’ and is in no doubt ‘of the ultimate emancipation of that extensive and fruitful country’. As independence is allowed to flourish, ‘a representative and federal government’ will emerge ‘which, by its rapid advancement towards order, will procure happiness to nineteen millions of people already civilized, and prepare the same advantage for a vast number of Aboriginese, who are yet in their primitive state of independence’ (p. 482). Independence is therefore the first step in a process of regular and orderly improvement from a quasi-feudal regime towards a government that will promote happiness and refinement; and in its presentation of a gradual historical
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development by stages, the article again seems indebted to Robertson. Hunt’s primary objective in his articles on South American independence is to condemn Ferdinand’s reactionary regime in old Spain, but at times he combines his attack on Spanish imperial aggressiveness with his concerns about European literary and cultural development; and he uses both the South and North American colonies as a means of assessing the state of Britain’s own cultural standing. In an article on South America for 17 August 1817, he claims that one of the reasons for Ferdinand’s prevention of South American independence is ‘a fear, “a base fear,” that “industry and the arts will hasten to abandon Europe for more favoured climates!”’ Hunt agrees that South America may surpass Europe, but not because it is inherently superior: ‘Why if the Allies, with their broken promises, are to do every thing they can to thrust talent and knowledge out of Europe, and restore dullness, and bigotry, and all the worst aspects of despotism, what are they to expect but that the former will go where they can?’ (p. 520). North America represents for Hunt an even more powerful example of the way in which liberty could be harnessed to cultural, economic and political reform. His articles on Birkbeck and emigration in the Examiner for 1818 demonstrate the way in which emigration to America was used as a political tool by the British oppositional and radical press. In an article for 6 September 1818 he suggests that there are two main reasons for emigration from the Old to the New World: an excess of population and ‘a bad state of things’, claiming that Britain is ‘under the influence of both these causes’ (p. 563). Hunt goes on to argue that the western parts of America offer an asylum from the corruption and extravagance of Britain; and he quotes lengthy passages from Birkbeck’s Notes on a Journey in America (1818) and Letters from Illinois as a means of encouraging if not emigration itself, then at least a healthy criticism of the British government (pp. 565–6). In a later article for 15 November 1818, Hunt considers a less romantic view of America in the form of Henry Bradshaw Fearon’s Sketches of America or more fully his Narrative of a Journey of Five Thousand Miles Through the Eastern and Western States of America (1818).22 Fearon spent nine months in America visiting principal cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Boston as well as the states of Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois and New Orleans; and while, according to Hunt, ‘a lover of liberty’ and ‘admirer of the American Constitution’ he found the American character to be inferior to the British. Americans, he argues, are ‘generally unsocial, narrow-minded, boasting, cold and blunt in their manners, bigoted and interested’, and he attributes their unsocial disposition to their extreme spirit of independence which ‘destroys a proper social subordination’.
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Moreover, the Americans ‘fancy that they excel in all things, that they are, in short, “the most enlightened nation in the world”’. This, Fearon maintains, is the result of ‘“their being so far removed from the seat of the arts and sciences, that their acquirements are not tried by the only effectual standard, – comparison”’ (p. 722). While Hunt praises America for its independence, economy and representative government, he too is unwilling to concede American superiority in the arts: ‘it is very clear it [the American good opinion of themselves] cannot proceed from their own literary excellence’ (p. 722). In another article on emigration for 27 December 1818 he sets out Fearon’s opinion of the classes of British society that would benefit from emigration to America; namely, ‘our extreme poor’. The man of small fortune who cares little about politics, on the other hand, would not benefit from emigrating to America; nor significantly, would the literary man or artist, neither of whom would find a community or climate of creative genius suitable to his endeavours (p. 819). Hunt’s articles indicate that North America’s cultural and political achievements after the American revolution aroused a number of anxieties in Britain, one of which was whether the centre of civilisation and culture might eventually shift westward from Europe to America. James Chandler has demonstrated that levels of anti-American sentiment were high from 1815 to 1830, and that fears were aroused by issues such as the American constitution, the Napoleonic wars, emigration and an increased literary competitiveness between Britain and America. All of these things, he argues, ‘brought a new America newly into focus in Britain’, although it was not until after the wars with France had ended that ‘Americawatching’ became a ‘British national hobby’.23 Keats’s long journal letters written to George and Georgiana after they emigrated certainly manifest a desire not only to discover what life in America is like – ‘Are there any flowers in bloom you like—any beautiful heaths—Any Streets full of Corset Makers’ (LJK, II, 92) – but also to situate America within the context of British historical and cultural improvement: Dilke, whom you know to be a Godwin perfectibil[it]y Man, pleases himself with the idea that America will be the country to take up the human intellect where england leaves off—I differ there with him greatly—A country like the united states whose greatest Men are Franklins and Washingtons will never do that—They are great Men doubtless but how are they to be compared to those our countrey men Milton and the two Sidneys— (LJK, I, 397)
Keats reveals his scepticism towards the idea of translatio imperii and the ability of America to overtake Britain, but he also appears to register the importance of the colonies in defining Britain’s own state of literary
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development.24 He may seem aggressive in his assertion of English cultural authority, but as Hunt’s Examiner articles demonstrate, the contrast between American commercialism and English wholesomeness was made even by liberal supporters of America such as Hunt and Fearon. Keats primarily dismisses Washington and Franklin because of their attitude to financial gain: ‘The one is a philosophical Quaker full of mean and thrifty maxims the other sold the very Charger who had taken him through all his Battles’ (LJK, I, 397). As Chandler has pointed out, he essentially argues that the reason why America cannot eclipse England lies in its cultural materialism. The Americans privilege men like Washington and Franklin over men like Milton and Sidney; in other words, they privilege ‘Men of Power’ over ‘Men of Genius’, politicians over poets, and pragmatism over the imagination. While rejecting Godwinian perfectibility, Keats seems to be endorsing another version of historical improvement in his letter: the refinement or development of humanity through cultural achievement.25 In the ‘Mansion of Many Apartments’ passage of his letter to Reynolds of 3 May 1818, Keats depicts another vision of human improvement that is based on a series of progressive stages (LJK, I, 280–1). The sociological implications of this passage have been discussed in the previous chapter, in which I argued that Keats’s attempt to recast in personal and individual terms the more general idea of a development by stages has much in common with the methodological individualism evident in the work of the Scottish Enlightenment social theorists themselves. However, Voltaire’s work on primitive and ancient civilisations could also have provided Keats with a model of human development on which to base his ‘Mansion of Many Apartments’ letter. Voltaire argued against the individualism of the so-called ‘natural law’ school and was largely impervious to the four stages theory, but in La Philosophie he undertakes an anthropological study of early human civilisations in which he contrasts ‘nascent’ (‘raison commencée’) and ‘cultivated’ reason (‘raison cultivée’). Voltaire does not, however, compare societies in the same way as the Scottish Enlightenment social theorists or put forward a detailed theory of human progress like Montesquieu, Turgot and Condorcet.26 Instead, he is more concerned to identify the natural and constant aspects of human behaviour that transcend various states of social development; in particular, he seeks to demonstrate that a sense of monotheism and a uniform moral understanding have existed throughout the ages.27 Voltaire’s insistence on the uniformity of moral codes and, hence, on the uniformity of human nature brings to mind Keats’s belief in the ‘Pain, Sickness and oppression’ that seems to exist in all stages and at all times of historical development in his ‘Mansions of Many Apartments’ letter.28
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In the discussion of historical progress that follows the acknowledgement of his reading of Robertson and Voltaire in his letter of 12 February– 3 May 1819, Keats again infuses his comments on the development of mankind with a sense of the suffering and oppression that occur in all stages of historical and cultural development, referring to both Robertson’s depiction of the ‘uncivilised’ Native Americans and Voltaire’s vision of ‘civilised’ French modernity in Le Siècle de Louis XIV, which is nonetheless frequently undercut by examples of religious sectarianism, such as Jansenism, Quietism and Huguenot persecution (Louis XIV, II, 185–213, 214–46, 247–59): How lementabl[e] a case do we see the great body of the people in both instances: in the first, where Men might seem to inherit quiet of Mind from unsophisticated senses; from uncontamination of civilisation; and especially from their being as it were estranged from the mutual helps of Society and its mutual injuries—and thereby more immediately under the Protection of Providence—even there they had mortal pains to bear as bad; or even worse than Baliffs, Debts and Poverties of civilised Life (LJK, II, 100–1)
Keats’s letter implies that between the world of the Native Americans and Louis XIV’s France there is little difference: the plagues of seventeenthcentury France, with its ‘Baliffs, Debts and Poverties’, are equally present (although manifested differently) in savage America. In spite of their apparent belief in mankind’s advance from ‘barbarism to refinement’ and a uniform improvement in policy and manners over the ages, Robertson and Voltaire likewise point to many similarities between apparently civilised man and his primitive and feudal predecessors: fanaticism, religious sectarianism and other forms of violence are evident even in the comparatively civilised sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Voltaire claims in the opening of Le Siècle de Louis XIV that European civilisation is approaching perfection (I, 3–4), but his optimistic view of history is continually compromised by anachronistic episodes of violence and by a more general religious superstition or ‘fureur épidémique’ that pervades Europe (see, e.g., Louis XIV, II, 214–46).29 The History of America similarly contrasts European progress with the destruction of the American Indians and undermines the idea of orderly historical progress by depictions of the uncontrollable greed and brutality of the Spanish conquerors during their ‘[r]apacious and daring adventures’ (II, 349).30 The influence of Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs is also clear in this part of Keats’s letter. In the Essai the history of mankind is portrayed as a one of cruelty and ‘universal anarchy’ (Essai, II, 804).31 Similarly, in Le Siècle de Louis XIV, apart from the four ‘golden ages’ outlined in the opening chapter, the history before the reign of Louis XIV is defined either ‘in terms
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of negatives’ or quite simply as ‘absence’. The view of the past that he evokes in both these works is not one of ‘historical evolution, but positive and negative manifestations of order’.32 Voltaire also argues in the Essai sur les mœurs, particularly in chapter four of La Philosophie ‘De la connaissance de l’âme’, that human suffering and historical upheaval are analogous to natural revolutions (Essai, I, 11–12).33 Keats appears to echo Voltaire’s materialist position in his subsequent views on perfectibility and the limitations to it imposed by the natural world: The whole appears to resolve into this—that Man is originally ‘a poor forked creature’ subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to hardship and disquietude of some kind or other … The most interesting question that can come before us is, How far by the persevering endeavours of a seldom appearing Socrates Mankind may be made happy … But in truth I do not at all believe in this sort of perfectibility—the nature of the world will not admit of it—the inhabitants of the world will correspond to itself— … Look at the Poles and at the sands of Africa, Whirlpools and volcanoes—Let men exterminate them and I will say that they may arrive at earthly Happiness—The point at which Man may arrive is as far as the paralel state in inanimate nature and no further (LJK, II, 101)
He seems to reject here both the evolutionist idea of biological perfection and the philosophical idea of perfectibility or the notion of a predetermined capacity for an endless improvement in knowledge and happiness, as expressed in treatises such as Joseph Priestley’s The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated (1777) and Godwin’s Political Justice.34 Stuart Sperry has pointed out the connections in tone and detail between Keats’s letter and the opening of La Philosophie, ‘Changements dans le globe’ (Essai, I, 3–5), suggesting that, like Voltaire, Keats ‘had come to see such evidences of natural disharmony and its “enormous changes and revolutions” as not only fundamental to man’s worldly plight, but also as analogous to the course of human history’. Sperry rightly argues that what distinguishes Keats’s scepticism from the historical pessimism of Ovid, Spenser or Milton is his objective, scientific approach to the relationship between man and nature. In other words, the terminology used in Keats’s letter is drawn from the language of Enlightenment natural philosophy, albeit without the customary religious references to providence and the ordering hand of a benevolent deity commonly found in the work of English natural philosophers such as Price and Priestley. Moreover, like Voltaire in the ‘Des Sauvages’ chapter of La Philosophie, Keats, in this passage and earlier in the same letter, connects man with the savagery and instinct of the animal world so that the condition of ‘the
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beasts of the forest’ is presented ‘as symbolic of man’s own state’: ‘The greater part of Men make their way with the same instinctiveness, the same unwandering eye from their purposes, the same animal eagerness as the Hawk’ (LJK, II, 79).35 The relative progression to the ‘Chamber of Maiden-Thought’ does not, therefore, eradicate the suffering evident in the first chamber or ‘infantile’ stage because that suffering is, for Keats, an inherent and unchanging part of animal existence, but it may, he implies in his 3 May 1818 letter to Reynolds, provide an enhanced understanding of suffering as an ever-present corollary to personal, cultural and historical progress.
Stadial Theory and the Primitive Encounter Narrative in Hyperion Hyperion is usually read as a (failed) ‘progress poem’ or as an extended narrative of Keats’s linear and progressive (here read ‘Enlightenment’) view of history ‘with the passage from the Titans to the Olympian Gods representing variously the political progression from the seventeenthcentury Restoration to the present age of revolution, the fading of Europe’s ancien régime before Napoleon’s democratic innovations, the development of world culture from the ancient East to the modern West, the advance of poetry from the past to the present’.36 The poem certainly has an imperialist flavour and Keats would have had a useful introduction to the history of empire from Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs, Robertson’s History of America and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. At least in Britain, Gibbon popularised dichotomies relating to empire such as ‘barbarian’ and ‘Roman’, ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’, ‘east’ and ‘west’, and ‘strength’ and ‘weakness’; and a similar understanding of empire emerges in many aspects of the poem from its comparative approach to eastern and western empires, its structural movement from the vanquished Titans to the conquering Olympians, and its representation of the Titans’ weakness.37 More recently, some critics have noted the incompatibility between the poem’s ‘abstract theories of progress’ and the ‘Titans’ degenerative suffering’, emphasising Keats’s movement towards a kind of ‘revisionary’ historicism.38 While there is little doubt that Keats modifies and revises some of the characteristic concerns and forms of Enlightenment thinking both here and elsewhere, Hyperion is nonetheless indebted to French and Scottish Enlightenment stadial models of history and to the comparative/ conjectural technique. The depiction of the Titans in book one marks their reign as falling within the first ‘infant’ chamber of Keats’s ‘Mansion of Many Apartments’, or what in stadial terms Robertson describes as ‘the
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infancy of civil life’ (History of America, II, 269). Thea is referred to as ‘a Goddess of the infant world’, while the Titans are described as ‘sky-children’ (I, 26, 133), coinciding with Robertson’s ‘repeatedly infantilised’ Native Americans in The History of America.39 The story of the Titans and the Olympians is closely linked to eighteenth-century anthropological theories on the Native American Indians by virtue of its classical source material. Lafitau, in his Mœurs des sauvages amériquains comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps (1724), claimed that the American Indian tribes were living models of the classical societies of ancient Greece and Rome; and Diderot, too, argued in Le Neveu de Rameau (1762) and Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1796) that the ‘noble savages’ of contemporary times were replicas of ancient Greek and Roman civilisations.40 The Titans of the poem are primarily figured as Egyptian rather than Greek, but following Scottish and French Enlightenment thinkers like Robertson, Lafitau and Diderot, Keats appears to unite in their image various and historically remote examples of primitive societies from the ancient Egyptians to the primitive Celts to the infant Native Americans.41 Historical comparisons between the Native Americans and various ancient peoples can be traced back to the fourteenth century, where it was believed that similarities between modern natives and ancient societies were evidence of direct genetic descent. By the eighteenth century, proponents of the origins theory had for the most part rejected the idea of genetic descent, arguing instead that similarities between ancient and modern primitive societies were evidence of ‘like causes’ such as similar environmental and climatic situations or modes of subsistence.42 The History of America has as its major source material Cornelius de Pauw’s Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains (1768–69) and Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle or Natural History (1749–67) (a copy of which was found in Keats’s library after his death), both of which contain variations of the origins theory. Buffon argues in volume three of his Natural History that the human race is unitary and that different races exist only because of external factors such as climate.43 In chapter two of La Philosophie, ‘Des différentes races d’hommes’, Voltaire also considers the origins of the human race (Essai, I, 6–7), although he opposes the arguments of the socalled ‘transformist biologists’ such as Buffon and Lafitau, arguing instead that the differences between human races are not related to changes in climate or environment: ‘Le sauvage qui se croit une production de son climat, comme son original et sa racine de manioc, n’est pas plus ignorant que nous en ce point, et raisonne mieux’ (Essai, II, 340).44 Another example of the theories of climatic determinism ridiculed by Voltaire can be found in Montesquieu’s highly influential and widely read
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De l’esprit des lois or The Spirit of Laws (1748).45 In book fourteen Montesquieu considers laws ‘as relative to the Nature of the Climate’. He argues that ‘[t]he inhabitants of warm countries are, like old men, timorous; the people in cold countries are, like young men, brave’ (I, 317); and he attributes this difference to the fact that ‘cold air constringes the extremities of the external fibres of the body’, which in turn ‘increases their elasticity, and favours the return of the blood from the extremities to the heart’. In hot climates, on the other hand, the body is deprived of vigour and strength, and ‘the faintness is communicated to the mind’ (I, 316, 320). Montesquieu specifically relates his theory of climatic determinism to the American Indians, remarking that ‘[t]he Indians are naturally a cowardly people’ as a result of the intemperate climate in which they live (I, 321). Robertson, too, notes that there are fewer species of animals peculiar to South America because of its climate, and that in general the ‘principle of life’ in South America is ‘less active and vigorous’ (History of America, I, 259). Shortly after discussing the South American climate, he describes the natives as ‘a naked, feeble, and ignorant race of men’ (I, 252–6, 286); and in presenting his natives in this way, he not only draws on theories of climatic determinism, but also on the related idea of the immaturity or degeneracy of the New World popularised by Buffon, de Pauw and Raynal.46 Buffon, for example, argued that the flora and fauna of American were inferior to corresponding European species, and had therefore degenerated from their Old World equivalents. Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, thought that the American natives were physically and morally superior to Europeans.47 In a letter to Taylor of 5 September 1819, Keats remarks that agriculture ‘is the tamer of men; the steam from the earth is like drinking their mother’s milk—It enervates their natures. This appears a great cause of the imbecillity of the Chinese’ (LJK, II, 156). This passage suggests that he was well aware of theories of racial and climatic determinism, and H. E. Briggs has rightly attributed his comments on agriculture and humidity to The History of America (I, 343–5), and his comments on the Chinese to Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Manner’ for The Round Table (1817), which he had read by 1818. Hazlitt’s view of the Chinese was itself derived from Goldsmith’s well-known representations of the Chinese as a feeble and indolent race in his Citizen of the World or Letters from a Chinese Philosopher (1762) and A History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774). Like Goldsmith, Hazlitt argues that the ‘foolish Chinese’ and ‘people of the East make it their business to sit and think and do nothing’; and he similarly ascribes these national characteristics to climate (HW, IV, 46).48
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Keats does not go so far as to present his Titans as imbeciles or savages, but as Briggs astutely points out, by imbecility Keats means physical degeneration as well as foolishness; and in the first two books of Hyperion the feebly impotent Titans are represented as vastly inferior to the new gods in evolutionary terms: the quality that separates them is their respective aptitude for mental and bodily vigour.49 The opening description of Saturn in book one, for example, accentuates both his physical weakness and his lack of vitality or spirit: ‘Upon the sodden ground / His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead, / Unsceptred’ (I, 17–19). The adjectives used to describe his demise presuppose the vitality of his prefallen state (‘spirited’, ‘energetic’, ‘alive’, ‘sceptred’) and successively represent the verbal equivalent of his fall from power, ultimately signalled by the final word, ‘Unsceptred’. In his encounter with the Olympians, Saturn has become a ‘nerveless’ statute devoid of animation, ‘quiet as a stone, / Still as the silence round about his lair’ (I, 4–5); an artifact, sign or semblance merely of his former self: ‘“I am gone / Away from my own bosom”’ (I, 112–13). Saturn’s bewilderment and fatalism, his sense of being ‘“smother’d up, / And buried from all godlike exercise”’ (I, 106–7), is evidence of his inability to comprehend historical change and hence to understand the demise of his pre-fallen self. His response to Thea’s outburst in book one is predominantly characterised by a lack of mental foresight and a sense of belatedness, expressed stylistically through a series of specious rhetorical questions whose very redundancy – ‘But it is so’ – emphasises their hollowness: 50 “Who had power To make me desolate? whence came the strength? How was it nurtur’d to such bursting forth, While Fate seem’d strangled in my nervous grasp? But it is so”; (I, 102–6)
In spite of his questioning puzzlement, Saturn can only reiterate in the present the conditions of his past glory, culminating in an illusory and counterfactual history of victory: ‘“it must—it must / Be of ripe progress— Saturn must be King. / Yes, there must be a golden victory”’ (I, 124–6, my emphasis). Each of the other Titans similarly exhibits only limited levels of historical understanding and they are equally unable to rouse themselves to action: Coelus is ‘but a voice’ (I, 340); Oceanus fatalistically declares that the ‘top of sovereignty’ (II, 205) is ‘“to bear all naked truths, / And to envisage circumstance, all calm”’ (II, 203–4); and Clymene’s comprehension of her ‘fallen house’ is engendered by her premonitory acceptance
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of the lingering voice of Apollo (II, 289–99). The Titans, in effect, evince the same response to defeat and possess the same feebleness of body and mind that Robertson attributes to the Native Americans in The History of America. His description of the seizure of the Inca monarch by Pizarro in book six, for example, describes the dejection into which he sinks as ‘in proportion to the height of grandeur from which he had fallen’ (History of America, II, 176); and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) contains very similar images of the conquered North America Indians and their sorrowful acceptance of defeat. Many of the studies on the Native Americans that emerged after the American revolution of 1776 attempted to explain the reasons for their socalled ‘ignobility’ and lack of vitality, and some were based on personal interactions or encounters between natives and Europeans. In spite of its lack of primary anthropological research, The History of America can also be read as an encounter narrative. Robertson dramatises Columbus’s first interview with the natives of Hispaniola, for example, ‘as a (potentially tragic) meeting between representatives of incompatible stages of human development’ and social evolution:51 The former, enlightened and ambitious, formed already vast ideas with respect to the advantages which they might derive from those regions that began to open to their view. The latter, simple and undiscerning, had no foresight of the calamities and desolation which were now approaching their country. (History of America, I, 93)
The Titans’ clash with the Olympian gods in Hyperion is portrayed in devastatingly similar terms. Although the poem is primarily concerned with the aftermath of that encounter, they too are the victims of evolutionary change and possess ‘not vigour either of mind or of body to sustain this unusual load of oppression’ (History of America, II, 346). Like their Native American counterparts, the Titans are bewildered by their loss of power, demonstrating only a passive understanding of the historical forces at play in their overthrow. Just as Robertson’s natives ‘must choose between extermination by the conquering Spaniards or submission to their culture’ so too the Titans must acquiesce to the apparently undeniable forces of natural law – ‘“We fall by course of Nature’s law, not force / Of thunder, or of Jove”’ (II, 181–2) – and to the superiority of their successors: ‘“So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, / A power more strong in beauty, born of us / And fated to excel us”’ (II, 212–14).52 The neoclassical notion of declension underpinning the chronological sections of Voltaire’s Louis XIV and much of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall has obvious resonances in Oceanus’s speech on progress and the cyclical quality of natural law: ‘“Yea, by that law, another race
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may drive / Our conquerors to mourn as we do now”’ (II, 230–1). Enceladus initially dismisses this speech as ‘baby-words’ (II, 314), scorning his fatalistic ‘lore’ (II, 333), but ultimately, he too longs for ‘innocent’ days ‘“before our brows were taught to frown”’ (II, 336, 339); and even glowing Hyperion, the only Titan who refuses to accede his sovereignty (I, 213–17), expresses himself in terms of puzzlement and blindness: ‘“why / Is my eternal essence thus distraught / To see and to behold these horrors new?”’ (I, 231–3); ‘“The blaze, the splendor and the symmetry, / I cannot see—but darkness, death and darkness”’ (I, 241–2).53 Although as yet unfallen, Hyperion can communicate only through rhetorical questions, negatives and repetition: the formal, stylistic counterparts of limited understanding and historical blindness. One of the more distinctive and much remarked upon features of Hyperion’s characterisation, and indeed of the Titans more generally, is its Egyptian flavour (I, 176–9). Alan Bewell has reminded us that art and, even more importantly, the appropriation of art was a potent symbol of civilisation and imperial greatness. Napoleon’s Egyptian campaigns and the British appropriation of the Elgin marbles and Egyptian artifacts were contemporary examples of the idea that empires were cultural as well political and military constructions, and it is certainly no coincidence that a ‘public receptiveness’ to literary and visual representations of the past emerged at the same time as expansion of empire.54 The significance of Keats’s representation of the defeated Titans as aestheticised, sculptural figures has accordingly been well documented, but the Egyptian imagery in the poem also invokes meanings attaching to Egypt more generally in the period. On the one hand, the figure of the wise Egyptian was a common one and was adopted by French Enlightenment thinkers such as Bossuet, Condillac and Maillet, all of whom regarded Egypt as the source of civilisation.55 On the other hand, Voltaire, amongst others, was hostile towards the Egyptians, refusing to believe that they were the world’s oldest civilisation and dismissing their art in La Philosophie as disproportionate. Their pyramids, he claims, are ‘élevés par le despotisme, la vanité, la servitude, et la superstition’ (Essai, I, 79).56 Mavor also uniformly presents the achievements of the eastern nations in an injurious light. The pyramids are portrayed not as glorious architectural feats but as symbols of despotism: ‘The stupendous pyramids of Egypt, which still exist to evince the vain despotism and absurd superstition of man, may be referred to the same class of buildings as those we have mentioned [those of Babylon and Nineveh] …’ The taste of the ancient Phoenicians is similarly ostentatious and vain: ‘they aimed more to dazzle the imagination than to affect the heart’ (Universal History, I, 32, 34).
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The connection between the Titans and the ancient Egyptians therefore links the Titans not only with the more positive associations attaching to Egypt in the period, but also with despotism, primitive superstition and limited understanding. Keats’s emphasis on Hyperion’s inability to see anything outside his ‘centre of repose’ (I, 243) similarly recalls Robertson’s remarks on the limitations of the Native American mind: ‘The thoughts and attention of a savage are confined within the small circle of objects immediately conducive to his preservation or enjoyment. Everything beyond that escapes his observation, or is perfectly indifferent to him’ (History of America, I, 309). Some tribes are even described as being incapable of ‘forming an arrangement for futurity’ (I, 309). Hyperion, like Saturn, cannot see anything but his own demise, even while proclaiming the rhetoric of battle; and his sense of loss, expressed syntactically in a predominance of negatives (I, 171–6), is explicitly bound up with the power and grandeur of his former existence: ‘“The shady visions come to domineer, / Insult, and blind, and stifle up my pomp”’ (I, 244–5). Without the assurance of his power, his ‘eternal essence’ or very identity is fundamentally vulnerable. In The History of America, Robertson presents the Native Americans as being without a ‘self-fashioned or unique’ identity; their identity is ‘merely a function of their mode of subsistence’ (I, 268).57 Hyperion’s and Saturn’s ‘crisis of self-identity’ also arises from the fact that they are not conscious of the self as a separate entity.58 Saturn’s ‘self’ is endangered by the loss of his power and subsequent disruption of his mode of existence: “—I am gone Away from my own bosom: I have left My strong identity, my real self, Somewhere between the throne, and where I sit Hence on this spot of earth. Search, Thea, search!” (I, 112–16)
Saturn defines himself in terms of absence and displacement, and when wrenched from his ancient order, he agonisingly asks why he cannot ‘create’, ‘form’ or ‘“fashion forth / Another world, another universe”’ (I, 141–3). The same answer applies to all the Titans: they cannot recreate themselves within the newly fashioned world of the Olympian gods because their identities are fundamentally tied to a way of being which is in demise.59 The continuity between Saturn and his mode of subsistence, which he can only envisage in terms of an unchanging present, is suggestive of the organicism of the Titans’ existence. The opening lines of the poem famously present a world of silence and timelessness, in which there is no temporal movement:
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The timeless ahistoricity of Saturn’s world is similarly reflected in the claustrophobic repetitiveness of the first stanza (‘Forest on forest’ and ‘cloud on cloud’ (I, 6, 7)) and in the spatial vacancy of his realm, a ‘space starr’d, and lorn of light; / Space region’d with life-air, and barren void; / Spaces of fire, and all the yawn of hell’ (I, 118–20).60 In The History of America, the natives’ incapacity to compute or understand the passing of time is one of the prime characteristics of their infancy (I, 305, 308–12). Closely connected to this defect is their inability to reason, abstract and reflect (I, 311); and for this reason, Robertson maintains that conceptions of time and space are not part of Native American languages (I, 312).61 Without referring to The History of America, James Jones has noted the connections between the perception of time and more or less sophisticated levels of consciousness in Hyperion: ‘The Titans and the Olympians belong to differing levels of consciousness because they have differing perceptions of time. The Titans live in the present alone, unperplexed by the past or the future.’ When the forces of time (‘the self-same beat of Time’s wide wings’ (II, 1)) make themselves felt in the poem, the Titans’ world collapses: ‘“O aching time! O moments big as years!”’ (I, 64).62 Jones ultimately reads the poem as ‘an epic on the theme of consciousness, more particularly, on the origin of two kinds of consciousness’, one of which is more advanced in evolutionary terms than the other.63 Kenneth Muir, on the other hand, sees the discrepancy between the old gods and the new gods in terms of Keats’s distinction between ‘Men of Power’ and ‘Men of Genius’ or ‘Achievement’. Keats uses Hazlitt’s idea of ‘disinterestedness’ in order to define this distinction in his letter to Bailey of 22 November 1817: the latter ‘have not any individuality, any determined Character’ (LJK, I, 84). According to Muir, Saturn and the other gods of the old dispensation possess fixed and determined identities, whereas Apollo has no identity and ‘possesses to a supreme degree the negative capability that Keats had laid down as the prime essential of a poet’: ‘A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—’ (LJK, I, 387).64 The Titans certainly have strong identities in comparison to Apollo’s reflexive discourse and shifting self-understanding, but crucially these identities are not self-fashioned; they are rather rooted in and defined by the conditions of their mode of existence. The loss of one necessarily
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entails the loss of the other: ‘“I will give command: / Thea! Thea! Thea! where is Saturn?”’ (I, 133–4). The reference earlier in the poem to Saturn’s now ‘Unsceptred’ hand points to the fixed, hierarchical nature of the Titans’ mode of existence, which is predicated on quasi-feudal notions of supremacy, rank and sovereignty. Oceanus argues that it is this very quality that has lead to their downfall: “Great Saturn, thou Hast sifted well the atom-universe; But for this reason, that thou art the King, And only blind from sheer supremacy, One avenue was shaded from thine eyes,” (II, 182–6)
Saturn’s blindness – a blindness which invokes not only the Native American Indians in their confrontation with Columbus and his men, but also Voltaire’s representation of Louis XIV’s blindness as to the outcome of the Battle of Blenheim (I, 300–75) and Gibbon’s depiction of Augustus’s tyrannical blind-spots in The Decline and Fall (I, 164, 197; II, 76–7) – is the result of his confidence in his own ‘sheer supremacy’; and Oceanus’s speech intimates that the Titans exist in a world distinguished by a clear demarcation of rank, established at the outset of the poem by Saturn’s ‘hoary majesty’ (I, 59). In French and Scottish Enlightenment anthropological studies, strict hierarchy was often presented as a characteristic of an underdeveloped society. Voltaire argues in the Essai sur les mœurs that the progress of the French state occurs primarily because of its rejection of feudal structures; and Robertson notes in The History of America that in their distinction of rank and unequal distribution of property, the natives present ‘an image of feudal policy in its most rigid form’: ‘The great body of the people was in a most humiliating state. A considerable number, known by the name of Mayeques, nearly resembling in condition those peasants who … were considered, during the prevalence of the feudal system, as instruments of labour attached to the soil’ (I, 271; and see also II, 277–9, 280, 313–14).65 While Keats sometimes uses a language of hierarchy and subordination in the poem that falls short of being specifically feudal, the organicism of the Titans’ world echoes Enlightenment representations of the organic nature of feudal society. The image of Thea in book one, weeping and kneeling before Saturn, her falling hair outspreading ‘[a] soft and silken mat for Saturn’s feet’ (I, 82), establishes their relationship as one of vassal and liege. Similarly, the entire brood of Titans yearns ‘for the old allegiance once more’ (I, 162) and listens ‘in sharp pain for Saturn’s voice’ (I, 163). When Saturn meets Enceladus’s eye in book two, the feudal awe aroused in Enceladus results
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in an expression of fealty: ‘“Titans, behold your God!” at which some groan’d; / Some started on their feet; some also shouted; / Some wept, some wail’d, all bow’d with reverence’ (II, 110–12); and book two ends with Enceladus, Iapetus, Creus and Phorcus repeatedly shouting forth Saturn’s name in a kind of homage, which in turn is reiterated by Hyperion and the other Titans (II, 387–91). Keats’s use of the word ‘allegiance’ when describing the Titans’ homage to Saturn is recognisably feudal in its connotations. In The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu refers to the ‘homage’ and oaths of ‘allegiance’ that vassals gave to the king in feudal societies (II, 350); and the earlier reference to the gathering of the Titans as an ‘assembly’ (II, 17) is also specifically feudal. (Montesquieu uses it to refer to meetings of vassals presided over by the king (II, 480, 425)).66 The fixed nature of the Titans’ mode of existence is contrasted with the unstructured freedom of Apollo’s ‘liegeless’ reign (III, 92). If the Titans represent ‘the infant or thoughtless Chamber’ and therefore understand history in terms of linear progress and natural law, Apollo is aware of the divisive nature of time and mortality (III, 90–1).67 Even the landscape in which his deification takes place is far removed from the barren setting of the Titans’ fall, the latter of which was modelled on Robertson’s descriptions of the harsh conditions of South America in The History of America.68 Enlightenment representations of the landscapes of the ancient, post-diluvian world and of the New World by Buffon and others often emphasised their rugged and unpleasing aspects.69 According to contemporary catastrophist theories such as Cuvier’s Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1813), the post-diluvian world was repeatedly fractured by violent geographic upheavals. These storms, earthquakes and volcanoes, it was argued, had a traumatic effect on primitive societies, determining their religious and cultural beliefs, and even their forms of government. The unstable nature of the ancient world had a similar effect on its poetry. Peacock maintains in The Four Ages of Poetry, for example, that ‘[t]he scenery by which he [the savage] is surrounded, and the superstitions which are the creed of his age, form the poet’s mind. Rocks, mountains, seas, unsubdued forests, unnavigable rivers, surround him with forms of power and mystery, which ignorance and fear have peopled with spirits, under multifarious names of gods, goddesses, nymphs, genii and dæmons’.70 The history of the earth was therefore deeply interconnected with eighteenth-century anthropological theories about the history of the human mind, and the progress of society and its literature. The Titans in Hyperion have been cast out of the skies and seas by the Olympians and now inhabit a dark and threatening earth. The vale in which we first find Saturn is damp, airless and shadowy: ‘Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn’ (I, 2). The rest of the Titans assemble in an
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equally gloomy ‘den where no insulting light / Could glimmer on their tears’ (II, 5–6) and their overthrow is accompanied by a parallel rebellion in a heavily animated nature: for the solid roar Of thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse, Pouring a constant bulk, uncertain where. Crag jutting forth to crag, and rocks that seem’d Ever as if just rising from a sleep, Forehead to forehead held their monstrous horns; And thus in thousand hugest phantasies Made a fit roofing to this nest of woe. Instead of thrones, hard flint they sat upon, Couches of rugged stone, and slaty ridge Stubborn’d with iron. (II, 7–17)
Their world is one of primeval rocks ‘just rising from a sleep’, jutting crags and flinty stone; and the landscape, like the Titans themselves, is ‘horribly convuls’d’ (II, 27). The earth on which Hyperion sheds his light later in book two is also one of gulfs, chasms, depths, ‘loud tormented streams’, ‘everlasting cataracts’ and ‘headlong torrents’ (II, 360–6). Hermione de Almeida has argued that these locations are ‘dark psychic places’ or ‘psychological landscapes’ and Keats’s intention in these passages is certainly to describe outwardly the process of the Titans’ internal division, but the purpose of the landscapes is also to associate the Titans with an ancient and primitive world of barrenness, upheaval and struggle.71 Apollo, on the other hand, wakes to find himself in a heavily cultivated, almost picturesque landscape: ‘Rejoice, O Delos, with thine olives green, / And poplars, and lawn-shading palms, and beech / In which the Zephyr breathes the loudest song, / And hazels thick, dark-stemm’d beneath the shade’ (III, 24–7). The world in which his deification takes place is not an ancient, barren world marked by physical upheaval, but rather the modern, civilised, elegant landscape of progressive refinement. His subsequent characterisation in book three as a representative ‘modern’ is one of the poem’s more ambivalent and unresolved features.
Apollo, Columbus and Enlightenment Language Theory Apollo’s deification initially resonates with the same sense of the excitement, discovery and appropriation that the ‘watcher of the skies’ feels in On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer (9): ‘Soon wild commotions shook him, and made flush / All the immortal fairness of his limbs’ (Hyperion, III, 124–5). Keats’s literary imagination can be both aggressive
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and possessive: in On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, for example, he imagines America opportunistically as a place of conquest as well as discovery – as a new literary horizon ‘up for grabs’.72 The History of America has long been acknowledged as one of the sources for the Chapman’s Homer sonnet, but Keats could equally have drawn upon its representations of discovery and exploration for his depiction of Apollo’s deification in Hyperion. Robertson describes, for example, the excitement over the Portuguese voyages of discovery (History of America, I, 49), an excitement that increases when Columbus discovers America (I, 57); and Keats would have come across a similarly imperialistic and jubilant tale of discovery in Mavor’s Historical Account of the Most Celebrated Voyages (1796–1801) which also initially dwells on the wonder of the New World: ‘A new world was now about to salute their eyes; and frigid must that soul be, who reads this narrative, and cannot enter into the feelings of Columbus, and participate in the joys of his men’ (Voyages, I, 10).73 Numerous critics have noted a connection between Apollo and Napoleon, but the image of the enlightened, humane and ‘modern’ Columbus setting off on an experiential voyage of discovery which eventually results in his conquest of primitive societies is at least as persuasive a model as Napoleon for Keats’s depiction of the agent of historical change in the poem.74 Robertson established for later readers and historians such as Mavor an important image of Columbus that only gained in currency throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: that of the ‘modern before his time’, represented as a Christian explorer, an inspired discoverer of America and a man of scientific vision, ‘whose achievements were based largely upon a rejection of traditional exegetical models of understanding in favour of direct empirical confrontation with the natural world’.75 Keats’s engagement with the Columbus myth is all the more likely if we consider that during the composition of Hyperion his mind was increasingly on his brother (supposedly in Birkbeck’s settlement in America) and that Birkbeck was himself frequently compared to Columbus.76 Fiona Robertson has demonstrated that a number of literary representations of Columbus in the early nineteenth century resist their subject matter and respond to ‘key structural and narratorial problems in the tale of Columbus, as well as to difficulties in accounting for him intellectually, historically, and nationally’, arguing that their unease with his story is suggestive of the ‘fundamental difficulty in integrating Columbus to linear histories of his imagined land’.77 Her idea of Columbus as ‘displacement’ has obvious affinities with the ambivalent representation of Apollo in Hyperion; and this ambivalence is, moreover, echoed in Robertson’s and Mavor’s histories. Columbus may be presented as a visionary in The
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History of America, but Robertson does not neglect the bitterness of the aftermath of his voyages, and much of the history is in fact ‘about the cost of this excitement and adventure both to the Native American peoples and to the European migrants to the New World’.78 Mavor even goes so far as to question whether Europe really gained anything by its colonisation of America, and incidents like Peter Magritte’s atrocities against the natives disgust him to the extent that he is not surprised that Columbus’s third voyage results in the failed colony of Domingo (Voyages, I, 29, 36, 46–57), although he asserts that Columbus himself will nonetheless ‘enjoy the preeminence that is due to superior penetration and perseverance’ (I, 29). The idea of Apollo as an ambivalent, ‘modern’ Columbus figure and the Titans as either ‘infants’ or ‘ancients’ is reinforced in the poem by references to Apollo as ‘loveliness new born’ (III, 79) and by the representation of his enabling state as one of continual rebirth as compared to the Titans’ frozen forms. His existence is a puzzle of ‘pain and pleasure’ (III, 66) and of ‘[p]erplex’d’ thought (III, 49); and his characterisation is not, therefore, feudal and organic but mobile and human.79 Like Columbus, he is both imperial conqueror and enlightened modern, and his modernity is suggested by his capacity for wonder and discovery as well as by his empirical, first-hand confrontation with the world around him. In the goddess Mnemosyne’s face he sees ‘“Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, / Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, / Creations and destroyings”’ (III, 114–16), and however simulated, his ‘wondrous lesson’ (III, 112) is not a speculative or theoretical education. He agonisingly feels these visions on his pulses and must ‘Die into life’ (III, 130); that is, he must sympathetically identify with and appropriate the suffering of the Titans in order to understand the world which pours into the hollows of his brain.80 In this visionary state, Apollo is able to address Mnemosyne: ‘“Mnemosyne! / Thy name is on my tongue, I know not how”’ (III, 82–3); and his instinctive understanding recalls the terms of Adam’s dream in Keats’s letter to Bailey of 22 November 1817, in which Adam awakes to find his dream true (LJK, I, 184–5): ‘“Yes,” said the supreme shape, / “Thou hast dream’d of me; and awaking up / Didst find a lyre all golden by thy side”’ (III, 61–3). Apollo is not so much concerned to explain the events that have occurred during the rebellion as he is intuitively to understand them. Oceanus’s speech has been said to encapsulate Keats’s views on historical progress, but the very fact that it is the conquered Oceanus rather than Apollo who provides this explanation of the Titans’ overthrow is significant. The Titans must find a reason for their fall – ‘“Not in my own sad breast, / Which is its own great judge and searcher out, / Can I find reason why ye should be thus”’ (II, 129–31) – suggesting
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that their mode of historical understanding is limited to causal explanation: Oceanus’s logic and passive fatalism is characteristic of all the Titans and of their mode of understanding the historical forces at play in their overthrow.81 Apollo, on the other hand, represents a new phase in human development and historical understanding, and his simultaneous expression of grief and joy is, like Madeline’s visionary experience, the product of a higher-order understanding. In Apollo, history is represented not as a sequence of events that can be examined and explained, but rather as a process that requires intuitive understanding. He has no desire to explicate causality, and instead gives in to the emotions of bewilderment, awe and wonder. Keats is careful not to confer upon Apollo the qualities of a conquering hero and his divinity is generated more by an understanding of sorrow than by a sense of triumphant conquest: ‘He listen’d, and he wept, and his bright tears / Went trickling down the golden bow he held. / Thus with half-shut suffused eyes he stood’ (III, 42–4). Ultimately, he comes to understand that power is displacement and that his visions cannot efface the Titans’ loss and suffering. Apollo’s acceptance of reciprocity and his understanding of the Titans’ loss suggest that Keats sees the development of modern poetry as dependent upon recapturing some of the epic grandeur of ancient poetry. In his 3 May 1818 letter to Reynolds, he argues for the need to reconcile the objective ‘epic passion’ of Milton’s poetic idiom with the subjective, egotistical sublime of the modern Wordsworthian style; and his decision to write in blank verse in the first two books of Hyperion is significant, ‘signalling a move away from Hunt and alignment with the more conservative poetics of Milton’.82 But Hyperion also explicitly raises the problem of how to access and represent the grandeur of the poetic past. The reader is offered only a translation of the Titans’ powerful ‘ancient’ speech which from the outset is inadequate and problematic: ‘Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue / Would come in these like accents; O how frail / To that large utterance of the early Gods!’ (I, 49–51). Just as the Titans are ‘likened to artifacts and simulacra’, suggesting that they are absent from the signs which represent them, the language of the poem’s first two books is a sign of absence, or of what Michael O’Neill has called Hyperion’s ‘self-thwarting confession of inadequacy’.83 Moreover, the ‘sharp stylistic discrepancy’ between books one and two, and book three – that is, between the Titans’ objective ‘Miltonic’ utterances and Apollo’s subjective discourse – is another of the poem’s unresolved interpretive problems and is so encompassing as to lead Marjorie Levinson to suggest that ‘the entire Hyperion project unfolds in the gap between
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Books 2 and 3.’ Traditionally, this change of linguistic reference has been seen as a lapse in Keats’s Miltonic style, but as the poem explicitly compares two stages of human development, it is reasonable to assume that the change in style is deliberate.84 Levinson also argues for a deliberate shift in style, seeing in the ‘vulgarity’ of book three an ‘attempt to vex the strong utterance of the first two books’. The Miltonic metre which colours books one and two, and which one critic has described as a ‘prototype of what might be called romantic correctness’, makes itself felt in the solemn and measured nature of the poem’s narration as well as in the Titans’ own utterances.85 The opening passage of the poem is therefore an ‘exercise in imitative form’, ‘a figured collapse of subject and object, manner and means’; and the Titans are emblems for ‘the manner and meaning’ of the first two books. Apollo’s discourse is reflexive, luxurious and sentimental, but equally representative of the meaning of book three: ‘“Point me out the way / To any one particular beauteous star, / And I will flit into it with my lyre, / And make its silvery splendour pant with bliss”’ (III, 99–102). Book three is, for Levinson, the first stage of the vexations or revisions to the poem that Keats undertakes in The Fall. Whatever Keats’s intention, the effect, as O’Neill has pointed out, is certainly one of vexation.86 Stylistically, the poem does not develop in a comfortable fashion: ‘What should take a progressive form (categorically, ancient to modern, classic to romantic, action to consciousness) is, in the poem, a manifest regression.’ But nor does it glorify the Miltonic idiom of the first two books. The opening representation of Saturn’s silence also concedes the ‘potential deathliness’ of the epic tradition.87 The end result is that neither the Miltonic style of the first two books nor the sensuous style of the third book is unambiguously endorsed by Keats. There are, moreover, certain ambiguities surrounding the binary characterisation of the Titans and Olympians as ancient/modern and primitive/sophisticated. Apollo’s stylistic discourse and that of book three more generally may be a return to the sensuous excess of Endymion’s bowers of bliss, but it is also the sensuous, modern Apollo who takes on some of the characteristics attributed by Enlightenment language theorists to primitive speech such as intuition, pre-linguistic sounds and expressive gestures. The question of language was central to eighteenth-century discussions of man’s development in society as most social theorists believed that the progress of society was impossible without the transmission of knowledge and thus without language. ‘Glottogenesis’, or the debate on the origin and development of language, was therefore often presented as part of a larger inquiry into social and cultural phenomena.88 Hugh Blair argued in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres that a natural language existed
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prior to the language of words arising from the agreement between men. These natural signs manifested themselves in the imitation of ‘the quality of the sound or noise which any external object made’ and, along with ‘passionate exclamations’, ‘were the first elements of Speech’. As a result, early language was exceptionally metaphorical: primitive men ‘were under a necessity of painting the emotion or passion, which they felt, by allusion to those sensible objects which had most relation to it’.89 Blair specifically relates this idea to the American Indians, quoting a speech of an Indian chief from Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations (1755); and in his Critical Dissertation he notes that an ‘American chief, at this day, harangues at the head of his tribe, in a more bold metaphorical style, than a European would adventure to use in an Epic poem’.90 As language progressed, however, ‘it gradually lost that figurative style, which was its early character’, and Blair goes on to relate his theory of language to the four stages theory of human development.91 In Hyperion it is the ‘ancient’ and ‘primitive’ Titans who discourse in causes, explanations, proofs and abstractions whereas the ‘modern’ Apollo is able intuitively to respond to Mnemosyneme. His throbbing throat and half-shut eyes (III, 82, 44) suggest that he recognises and responds to the natural signs, such as the ‘murmurous noise of waves’ (III, 40), in the world around him. His ‘wild commotions’ (III, 124) and shuddering limbs reveal not only the importance of experiential knowledge – ‘for axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses’ (LJK, I, 279) – but also the interdependence of language and the expressions of the body. His quest for understanding even ends in a reiteration of the sounds that encapsulate his sense of loss and displacement: ‘“And then upon the grass I sit, and moan”’ (III, 90). In this context, his final shriek at the end of book three represents not only the absence of a new poetic voice with which to replace that of the ancients – although Keats does abandon his attempt to write a modern epic at this point – but also the reaching back to preliterate society in which natural responses were predominant.92 The idea that Apollo takes on elements attributed to primitive speech is particularly significant in relation to his role as the god of poetry. Theories on the origin and progress of language were closely related to theories on the progress of literature. Adam Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (delivered 1762–63) argues that as societies develop there is a corresponding shift from poetry to prose, romances to novels, and biography to history. The substantial difference between traditional literary forms and more modern modes of writing is their originating mode of consciousness.93 In his Lectures on Rhetoric, Blair presents a similarly evolutionary view of literary forms and styles; and in his Critical
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Dissertation, he asserts that poetry is more ancient than prose.94 Blair’s obvious approval of Ossian – ‘His poetry, more perhaps than that of any other writer, deserves to be stiled, The Poetry of the Heart’ – draws on the influential idea that the art of early man was somehow closer to the sublime than the correctness of modern writers: ‘Hence, poetry, which is the child of the imagination, is frequently most glowing and animated in the first stages of society.’ 95 Apollo’s intuitive responses to the world around him, and the elements of awe and wonder that imbue his speech in book three, are suggestive of Keats’s desire to reassert the qualities of simplicity and natural power associated with the earliest stages of poetry.96 Through Apollo’s difficult transition to godhood and poethood, the poem intimates that what is required to redeem modern poetry is not so much the objectivity or grandeur of the ‘ancients’ (which, as we have seen, is problematic for Keats) as the immediacy and imaginative power of the primitive ‘infants’. Rather than presenting a neat correlation between Apollo as ‘modern’ and the Titans as ‘ancient’, the stylistic discrepancy between the Titans and the Olympians suggests a more complicated picture, as does the poem’s sympathy for the sorrow and suffering of the Titans.
Suffering, Sympathy and the Moral Lessons of History If, as some critics have argued, Keats largely elides the violent realities of imperial conquest in On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, in Hyperion he is specifically concerned with the oppression and sorrow of the vanquished Titans and, by corollary, with the human cost of the European adventures in the New World: ‘How beautiful, if sorrow had not made / Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self’ (I, 35–6).97 A number of critics have noted Keats’s sympathy for the fallen Titans without seeking to ascribe that impulse to anything more than intuitive sympathy. Others have seen it as a rejection of Enlightenment models of history; but Keats’s reading of Enlightenment history itself provides another source of explanation for this interpretive problem. J. C. Hilson, for example, has isolated in the work of eighteenth-century historians a genre of ‘sentimental historiography’ that he defines as ‘essentially a spectatorial experience for both historian and reader’ where ‘the ideal spectator is both impartial and sympathetic, rational and feeling’.98 Hilson’s argument stands in stark contrast to the assumption that irony is ‘the governing characteristic of Enlightenment history, and its primary mode of engagement with … the past’. Some other, more recent works on
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the Enlightenment have also acknowledged that the trope of irony is only ‘one among many rhetorical strategies available to eighteenth-century historians’, emphasising instead the sentimental, affective and expressive aspects of the period’s historical narrative. The importance of these studies lies not so much in their revisionism, but in their recovery of an historicism that was selfconsciously adopted by Enlightenment historians. As O’Brien has demonstrated, Robertson, Hume, Voltaire and Gibbon all meet the ‘prescription’ for ‘a history of sublime or moving special effects’, in which history is ‘a form of spectacle designed to awaken the imagination and stimulate the sensibility’ of its readers.99 Hyperion’s perspective never decisively invests in a sentimental rather than a naïve treatment of its mythic subject matter, but Keats was well aware of the importance of sympathy and sentiment in shaping the way the reader experiences a text.100 As we have seen, by 1817 he had read Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action, in which Hazlitt considers the moral power of the imagination and the importance of stimulating the interest and sympathy of the reader, arguing that sympathy is ‘always directly excited in proportion to our knowledge of the pain, and of the disposition and feelings of the sufferer’ (HW, I, 23).101 In his journal letter of 14 February–3 May 1819, Keats also admiringly extracts part of Hazlitt’s Letter to William Gifford (1819), in which Hazlitt argues that the imagination ‘delights in power, in strong excitement, as well as in truth, in good, in right’ and that this delight is relative to the ‘strong and often tragical effect’ of representations rather than ‘the good produced, or their desireableness in a moral point of view’ (LJK, II, 74–5).102 Much has been made of the fact that the Titans in Hyperion are represented as aestheticised forms or statutory ‘postured motionless, / Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern’ (I, 85–6); but on the whole, the Titans are characterised more by their ‘tears’ (I, 158) and ‘their big hearts / Heaving in pain, and horribly convuls’d’ (II, 26–7) than by their stasis. Hazlitt’s argument in his lecture ‘On Poetry in General’ (1818) that ‘Greek statues are little else than specious forms … marble to the touch and to the heart’ that ‘seem to have no sympathy with us, and not to want our admiration’ appears to be at work in Keats’s re-rendering of the Titans as objects of sympathetic identification rather than of stasis and power, providing what Hazlitt calls a ‘resting place for the imagination’. As silent statues the Titans are deified but they cannot truly be ‘objects of religious faith to us’ because they are not friends to humanity (HW, V, 10–11).103 Saturn’s realisation of loss is therefore accompanied by human tears (I, 35, 71, 79–80, 88) and by a (hypothetically) throbbing heart, which Thea futilely attempts to ease amidst her own grief: ‘One hand she press’d upon that aching spot / Where beats the human heart, as if just there, / Though
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an immortal, she felt cruel pain’ (I, 42–4, my emphasis). Absence becomes presence as Keats’s supposition (‘as if’) gives way to the Titans’ all too real experience of sorrow and loss. In spite of their immortality, their suffering can be explained only through the parallel of human loss, and it is therefore felt and experienced rather than explained or illustrated: ‘“O tender spouse of gold Hyperion, / Thea, I feel thee ere I see thy face”’ (I, 95–6, my emphasis). The Titans’ sorrow is, moreover, almost unpresentable in its physical and emotional enormity: ‘Meanwhile in other realms big tears were shed, / More sorrow like to this, and such like woe, / Too huge for mortal tongue or pen of scribe’ (I, 158–60). The extreme nature of this grief, in both a literal and a metaphoric sense, is suggestive of its representation in the poem as a kind of spectacle of mourning in which other characters and even at times the reader are invited to participate. Hyperion’s dejection, for example, involves the spectatorship of all the Titans and a conflation of feeling: ‘Despondence seiz’d again the fallen Gods / At sight of the dejected King of Day, / And many hid their faces from the light’ (II, 379– 81). The Titans not only witness Hyperion’s despair, but also feel it collectively. Similarly, Saturn’s plight is felt by the entire brood of Titans where ‘other hearts are sick of the same bruise’ (II, 104). Even the narrator’s voice in the poem aligns itself with the defeated Titans so that the reader is involved in this act of spectatorship. The presentation of Saturn in book one is initially straightforwardly descriptive (I, 1–21), but when he raises his ‘faded eyes’ to Thea, the reader looks through them to his lost kingdom and ‘all the gloom and sorrow of the place’ (I, 91). Author, subject and reader converge in Saturn’s first speech in an act of spectatorship that leaves little room for critical distance. In his representation of the Titans’ demise as a kind of sentimental tragedy, Keats would have had Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV as a model. The chronological representation of Louis’s reign is portrayed as a tragic drama in which Louis fails at the Battle of Blenheim. Moreover, Louis’s heroic tragedy is incorporated into the larger story of France’s greatness and defeat, just as Saturn’s fall in Hyperion is set within the larger story of a change in regime.104 But Keats would have had other examples on which to base his presentation of deposed majesty, not least the Native American monarchs in The History of America and Gibbon’s Augustus in The Decline and Fall, notably a figure appropriated by Louis XIV himself.105 In England, Augustus was sometimes represented as a tyrant, but he emerges in many histories of the period as ‘a noble and traduced figure, whose generous aspirations were shacked by his circumstances’.106 While Gibbon’s portrayal of Augustus is not overtly sentimental, Hume’s well-known description of Charles’s execution and its aftermath
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in The History of England has all the elements of a sentimental tragedy (‘The very pulpits were bedewed with unsuborned tears’ (VII, 145)); and Hume represents this tragedy largely through the spectatorship of a sorrowful public: ‘It is impossible to describe the grief, indignation, and astonishment, which took place, not only among the spectators, who were overwhelmed with a flood of sorrow, but throughout the whole nation’ (VII, 144). His representation of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots likewise presents the scene as a spectacle of tears and mourning, drawing specific attention to the spectators and their responses to Mary’s plight (V, 316).107 Robertson sought much the same effect as Hume in his own rendition of Mary’s story in The History of Scotland.108 The authorial voice in the history often adopts Mary’s perspective and, like Hume, Robertson emphasises the tears and grief of the spectators of her execution: her ladies are ‘bathed in tears’ while bursting ‘out into the most passionate expressions of tenderness and sorrow’. The ‘rest of the spectators’ are ‘silent, and drowned in tears’, being incapable ‘of any other sentiments, but those of pity or admiration’; and Robertson goes on to describe how Mary’s plight exceeds that of any fictional tragedy (History of Scotland, II, 146, 149, 151). The Titans are initially presented as inferior to the Olympians in evolutionary terms but the poem’s sentimentalism, combined with the narrator’s sympathy for their loss, undermines the effect of its stadial analysis and ultimately of Keats’s apparent authorisation of imperial progress. However, rather than signalling a movement away from its eighteenth-century source material, the disjunction in the poem between Keats’s stadial and sympathetic representation of the Titans echoes a similar disjunction in The History of America itself. Whereas the stadial sections of the history in books four, six and seven represent the Native Americans, Incas and Aztecs as examples of primitive developmental stages, the narrative portions correspond to an older type of historical writing which valued independence, patriotism and a hostility to foreign conquerors.109 Robertson is, for example, sympathetic towards las Casas, a critic of Spanish colonisation in the New World;110 and as Alexander Du Toit has convincingly argued, he also undermines the apparent savagery of the Native Americans by focusing on Spanish atrocities such as violence, greed and attempted cannibalism, leading Du Toit to go so far as to suggest that the history uses variations on the word ‘barbarian’ mainly to describe Spanish rather than native behaviour.111 Of the other historians Keats read on the Spanish colonies in South America, Marmontel is unremitting in his descriptions of the brutalities of the Spaniards. In the Preface to The Incas the Spaniards are compared to ‘half-famished tygers’ hunting for blood (p. i). Mavor is disgusted by
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the Spanish atrocities against the natives and welcomes the failure of Domingo (Voyages, I, 29, 36, 46–55). For Voltaire, the descriptions of Spanish depredations in the Americas in the Essai sur les mœurs produce examples of ‘savage irony’, which, it has been argued, are suggestive of his growing doubts about the value of historical explanation altogether. In Hispaniola, the Spaniards extinguish a whole race under the eyes of the monks of St. Jerome; in Mexico, Cortez massacres several thousands of Indians; and in Peru, Pizarro is equally barbarous (Essai, II, 339, 352, 354–61).112 Despite man’s general progress in science, government and commerce, imperialism in the New World results in repeated setbacks and lapses into barbarity. Hyperion’s emphasis on the big tears and anguished hearts of the fallen Titans suggests that Keats does not unequivocally endorse either the abstract trajectories of progress and decline that Oceanus elucidates in the beginning of the poem or the moral implications of his stadial depiction of the Titans as ignoble savages. Kucich accordingly sees Hyperion as developing a kind of ‘alternative history of the suffering subject’ which, he argues, discloses a complicated tension between Keats’s ‘investment in the master narratives of linear contrariety and his revisionary efforts to humanise them’.113 More specifically, however, this tension in the poem can be ascribed to Keats’s simultaneously stadial and sympathetic depiction of the Titans, which in turn reflects a similar tension in The History of America itself. The Hyperion project is not only revealing of that philosophically ‘forked creature’ that Chandler calls ‘enlightened romanticism’, but also reflects and illuminates the complexities of Enlightenment histories themselves.114 Even Gibbon’s attitude towards the less civilised past is by no means as dismissive as traditionally supposed. Jeremy Black has demonstrated that he was open to ‘the positive reevaluation during the enlightenment of “primitive peoples”’, comparing, for example, ‘the untutored Caledonians, glowing with the warm virtues of nature’ to ‘the degenerate Romans polluted with the mean vices of wealth and slavery’ (Decline and Fall, I, 133).115 The History of America may contrast the ‘infantile’ natives with the ‘vigorous’ Europeans, but it too has no ‘simple teleological tale’ to tell about human progress; and, like Hyperion itself, one of its most potent aspects ‘is its status as fragment’ . The unfinished North America section of the history ‘haunts the apparent unity’ of the narrative of Spanish conquest, ‘which seems like a prelude to an integrated colonial history that was never to be’.116 Keats’s sub-titling of Hyperion as ‘a Fragment’ and The Fall as ‘a Dream’ can similarly be interpreted as a result of his struggle to represent the story of the Titans and the Olympians in a unified and coherent way.117 The traditional explanation for Keats’s abandonment of
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the Hyperion poems is his supposed inability to write an epic that could rival Milton: ‘I have given up Hyperion—there were too many Miltonic inversions in it—Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful or rather artist’s humour’ (LJK, II, 167). But his failure to finish Hyperion is also a response to the historiographical and political imperatives of his age.118 Just as the fragmentary nature of Robertson’s history has been ascribed to the difficulties of manoeuvring through the controversy surrounding both the history of the Spanish empire and the war with North America, so Keats’s failure to complete Hyperion is the result of his inability to reconcile various political and historical concerns from the difficulty of accounting for figures like Columbus and Napoleon, and the anxiety over the American colonies to the barbaric brutalities of the Spanish conquests in the New World.119
Chapter 4
Political Economy: Commerce, Civic Tradition and the Luxury Debate in Isabella and Lamia
Another of the more pressing socio-political issues debated by Keats and his contemporaries was the question of whether commerce was beneficial to society and the majority of its members. Encompassing the discourses of moral philosophy, political economy and political science, the early nineteenth-century debate over the moral and social implications of economic exchange was essentially a reaction to Enlightenment conceptions of wealth-creation: the traditionally ‘benign’ view of economic endeavour as a civilising activity had been rejected by enlightened thinkers in the mid-eighteenth century in favour of a more systematic and scientific analysis of individual rights, free trade and the satisfaction of wants.1 The shift from an old ‘moral economy’ to a new ‘political economy’ necessarily challenged a number of civic humanist prescriptions, and economists became increasingly aware that the profit motive of commercial societies could undermine older qualities of independence and communal responsibility. Adam Smith argued as early as 1776 in his Wealth of Nations that while commerce encouraged liberty because each man was governed by self-interest, the division of labour could prove harmful to community and citizenship.2 As the nineteenth century progressed and the human cost of ‘letting the marketplace decide’ became more manifest, economists and reformers alike began to question whether the new commercial system would prove compatible with individual happiness and socio-political stability. Apart from growing apprehensions regarding wages and working conditions, a primary concern was whether modernisation and the privatisation of interests that accompanied an advanced commercial society would undermine civic virtue and corrupt the state.3 Hunt’s Examiner, which Keats read throughout 1818 and 1819, was one of the journals that took issue with what its contributors thought to be the insistent mechanisation of England at the expense of traditional ways of life. In the months immediately prior to Keats’s composition of Isabella in February 1818, Hunt ran a three-part leader in the Examiner
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entitled ‘Christmas and Other Old National Merry-Makings Considered’, which compared the ‘inauthentic’ festivities of contemporary holidays to ‘the Christmas greens and gambols … the gallantries, the golden means, the poetries, the pleasures, the leisures, the real treasures’ of ‘Merry Old England’ (21 December 1817, p. 801).4 He laments that England has become a society dominated by the commercial spirit and considers the importance of the old holidays for the revival of a set of values associated with ‘la nation bouquetiere, not boutiquiere; – the bloom-keeping, not the shop-keeping nation’ (28 December 1817, p. 817).5 In contrasting ‘unhappy industry’ with an older spirit of ‘sociality’ (p. 802), Hunt not only attempts to reverse the Enlightenment association of virtue with labour and vice with pleasure, but also to show the effects of commercialism on morality and the human spirit.6 His attack is essentially on the utilitarian principles underlying the new political economy – in particular, the ‘rationalization of selfishness and self-interest as an enlightened ideology’ – and relates to what later came to be known as the ‘condition of England’ debate, which helped to define Romantic culture by lamenting the cultural consequences of economic modernisation, including one of Keats’s own primary concerns: the changing role of literary culture in a commercialised society.7 In December 1817 Keats mentions in a letter to his brothers that he had read his friend Hunt’s ‘very proper lamentation on the obsoletion of christmas Gambols & pastimes’ (LJK, I, 191). He adds that ‘it was mixed up with so much egotism of that drivelling nature that pleasure is entirely lost’, but he could hardly fail to have been aware of the article’s affiliations with Hunt’s previous comments on the ‘old school’ of English poetry in the notes to The Feast of the Poets, which so influenced his own account of the progress of national poetry in Sleep and Poetry. In the notes, Hunt presents the sociability of ‘Old England’ as a healthy corrective to Wordsworth’s rural solitude, and to the egotism and gloominess that characterise his and other contemporary verse.8 In his lecture ‘On Burns and the Old English Ballads’ (1818), Hazlitt similarly compares Burns’s ‘fellowship’ and ‘highly sublimated essence of animal existence’ to Wordsworth’s reclusive contemplation, arguing that Burns’s modern Scottish ballads mark a return to the sociability of those old English ballads that ‘relate chiefly to good living and good fellowship, to drinking and hunting scenes’, as set out in an exemplary passage from a ballad lamenting ‘the sweet days of merry Robin Hood’ (HW, V, 131). His sentiments are very similar to those expressed in Keats’s own ‘Robin Hood’ poems, Robin Hood: To a Friend and Lines on the Mermaid Tavern (1818), in which Keats suggests that the merry and communal days of Robin Hood have been overtaken by a gloomy spirit of seclusion and money-getting:
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‘strange! that honey / Can’t be got without hard money!’ (Robin Hood, 47–8).9 By the time that he had written the ‘Robin Hood’ poems and Isabella, Keats had also read Hunt’s Foliage, in the preface to which Hunt specifically relates his views on the state of English society to poetic concerns, comparing ‘health and sociality’ with egotism and commercialism: ‘The depreciators of this world, – the involuntary blasphemers of Nature’s goodness, – have tried melancholy and partial systems enough, and talked of their own humility. It is high time for them, and for all of us, to look after health and sociality.’ 10 The ‘melancholy and partial systems’ to which Hunt refers are those systems of moral philosophy that neglect the principle of benevolence in favour of the principle of self-love as well as pessimistic economic theories such as Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), which argue against the perfectibility of society. In Foliage and throughout his writing in the Examiner, Hunt associates commercialism with pessimism, self-interest, deceit and unjust authority, just as when Keats mentions commerce, trade or money in his letters he repeatedly connects them with selfishness and deception (see, e.g., LJK, I, 281, 396–7; II, 24–5).11 Isabella and Lamia are not poems traditionally considered together. They were not written at the same time – Isabella was completed in April 1818 and Lamia in September 1819 – and they do not deal with their themes of the destruction of love, and the contrast between the ideal and the actual, in an obviously comparable way.12 Relatively recently, however, several critics have observed that both poems are concerned with money. In Isabella, most notably, the lovers fall prey to the commercial imperialism and mercantile greed of Isabella’s brothers; and quite apart from the overwhelming commercialism of its Corinthian setting, Keats’s own anxiety over money during the composition of Lamia resonates throughout that poem.13 Less regarded has been the way in which Keats’s representations of money in the poems relate to the larger debate about the effects of trade and commerce on the social, economic and political condition of England. Marjorie Levinson has asked the relevant question – ‘By what mechanisms, and to what extent … are love and money, pleasure and power, consumption and production, related in contemporary life?’ – but her always brilliantly subversive answers are grounded in Marxist and Freudian principles of fetishism, commodity exchange and symbolic capital, without seeking to relate those principles to then contemporary understandings of economic exchange.14 The two poems considered in this chapter deal with separate but intrinsically related issues in early nineteenth-century political economy: Isabella examines the effects of avarice and commercialism on the
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individual; Lamia, the broader social consequences of luxury and rampant consumerism. In both poems Keats rejects the kind of ‘enlightened’ commercialism that operates at the expense of civic humanist values and results in the excessive privatisation of human interests, a view that was endorsed by his friend Leigh Hunt in poems such as The Story of Rimini (1816) and in his more overtly political writing for the Examiner.
Leigh Hunt’s Examiner and the ‘Condition of England’ Debate The contrast between the excesses of trade and the simple virtues expounded in Hunt’s ‘Merry-Makings’ article recurs throughout the Examiner for the years 1816–19.15 In an article ‘On the Spirit of Moneygetting’ for the issue of 19 January 1817, Hunt attributes contemporary social problems to overly ‘sophisticated notions of gain and property’ (p. 33); and in the leader for 16 February 1817, he compares the virtues of ‘simplicity’ with the ‘business of society’, associating the idea of ‘sophistication’ with ‘selfish and petty feelings’ (p. 98). Trade is presented as the primary cause of English degeneracy and it is associated with virtually all of the evils of modern life: [I]t is this that has crowded city at the expense of country, injured our health, and turned our taste away from nature; this that has turned our literature into a mere matter of trade; that has made all real sentiment ridiculous in our eyes; that has converted our morality into a code of selfishness; in short, that has enfeebled, vulgarized, and enslaved us. (17 July 1817, p. 434)
In an earlier article entitled ‘Relief of the National Distresses’, Hunt even goes so far as to suggest that the spirit of over-possession is a ‘disease’ that has permeated the entire nation, infecting the very character and disposition of the English spirit: ‘Nations suffer for their errors, as well as individuals. England has long had a money-making propensity, – an overstrained love of possession for its own sake … The disposition of every nine Englishmen out of ten is soured by money-matters’ (25 August 1816, p. 529). Hunt’s jeremiads on the evils of early nineteenth-century England fall within a tradition of historical pessimism associated with social lamentation. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there were recurrent attacks on corruption, commerce and luxury, all of which tended to emerge in periods of war or economic hardship.16 Hunt’s attacks in the Examiner follow a similar pattern, usually taking as their starting point the effects of Britain’s war with France. Not only does he
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specifically connect the war with luxury, but he also tends to present it as part of a larger government ‘machine’ or ‘system’ that exploits the poor: ‘the extravagance and luxury of the rich, war, taxes, &c. have a tendency to increase the distresses of the poor … to grind down, to starve and impoverish the country with systematic impunity’ (18 August 1816, p. 534).17 Hunt is clearly opposed to the idea of ‘system’ and its associated characteristics of precision, exactitude and utility, attacking, for example, what he sees as the absurdities of Malthus’s mathematical exactness (p. 525). His arguments in relation to Malthus are not dissimilar to Hazlitt’s suggestion in his Reply to Malthus (1807) that Malthus’s grim inevitability and passiveness has turned ‘selfishness into a regular code’: ‘The poor, Sir, labour under a natural stigma; they are naturally despised. Their interests are at best but coldly and remotely felt by the other classes of society. Mr. Malthus’s book has done all that was wanting to increase this indifference and apathy’ (HW, IX, 182). It is the ‘taxation machine’ and ‘paper system’ in particular to which Hazlitt and Hunt ultimately attribute the onset of poverty and the unequal distribution of wealth; and Hunt rejects the idea put forward by Malthus that the money collected in taxes enables wealth to be distributed more equally among all parties: ‘the taxes fly away with the money of a nation … they go into the hands of the government-man and the fund-holder, and do not return into the pockets of the people who pay them’ (18 August 1816, p. 525). In the editorial for 4 January 1818 he expresses alarm at the enormous issue of paper money and predicts that the current system of finance cannot possibly last: ‘The time even, we believe, is just now fast approaching, according to the former prediction in paine’s Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance, – a treatise unanswered. “Go, count the graves,” said paine, to the false calculators of all sorts, “and learn the folly of your arithmetic”’ (p. 7). Paine’s pamphlet of 1796, like similar tracts written by Ricardo and Cobbett, argues that any wealth divorced from its substantial referent – the labour of the people – is illusory; and his play on the title of Gibbon’s famous history is suggestive of the degree to which contemporary ills were conceived in terms of wider historical patterns of progress and decline. Like Paine and the proponents of James Harrington’s Oceana (1656), who argued that the chief source of social corruption lay in the growth of commerce, paper money and public debt, Hunt takes issue with the idea that a utilitarian approach to monetary policy can cure the nation of its ills, and objects to what he sees as ‘the artificial and poverty-making wealth of the paper system’ (1 March 1818, p. 129). Hunt directly relates the inability of the fiscal system to prevent poverty
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and corruption to changes in British patterns of economic consumption: trade, he claims, ‘has doubled or trebled our wants, and consequently the worst parts of our pride’ (13 July 1817, p. 434). His association of social degeneration with economic consumption draws on a widely-known theory of historical decline in which social and moral changes were related to movements in the pattern of economic consumption: a government that allowed the tendency towards decline to become disproportionate would ‘collapse internally as if it were suffering from the disease consumption’.18 The neo-Harringtonians explained the growth or decline of liberty in societies in terms of their socio-political health and the republican idea of ‘civic tradition’ similarly suggested that a sound state was the result of a healthy constitution. Bolingbroke, for example, followed Renaissance commentators such as Machiavelli and classical writers such as Livy and Polybius when he suggested in The Patriot King that civic decline is inevitable as systems rise and fall in a recurring cycle.19 Hunt often invokes ideas relating to the ‘consumptive’ view of history and to the republican tradition of civic virtue, repeatedly referring to the spirit of luxury, money-making and over-possession as a ‘disease’, and noting its damaging effect on public virtue.20 However, he does also acknowledge the positive effects of commerce. In an article for 27 December 1818 he comments on ‘the progress and irresistible effects of Mechanical, Chemical, and other Scientific Power, in altering and increasing the sources of wealth, and enabling mankind to controul more equally the circumstances about them’, primarily presenting the social changes associated with commerce in a positive light (p. 818). In relation to the acknowledged negative effects of commerce, he optimistically considers his own age, by virtue of ‘the sorrow we have witnessed, the extremes of various sorts’, particularly alive to ‘the necessity of piercing vice and misfortune to the roots’ (15 March 1818, p. 161). In an article for 14 February 1819, Hunt again points out that he has ‘often expressed our belief that literary and scientific power will eventually alter the world …’, and suggests that while ‘temporary abuses’ are ‘apt to alarm the timid’ they are ‘the necessary results of all changes whatsoever’ (p. 97). In an article on Robert Owen’s plan for the poor, he refers to the ‘temporary’ evils of technological advances, but nonetheless partially defends the use of machinery on the basis that ‘[w]ithout machiney, it is evident we could not have exported to the amount that we have done; consequently, it made no small share of its own labour. Still, however, it must answer for a great portion of temporary misery; and we merely demur to Mr. Owen’s mention of it as the only cause’ (10 August 1817, p. 498). Robert Owen’s Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing
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System (1815) argued that trade had encouraged the decline of honest simplicity among the majority of people and its sentiments were, in the main, endorsed in the Examiner. But Hunt is nonetheless careful to distinguish between what he calls the ‘true mercantile spirit’ and the ‘fatal ascendancy of mere riches’: The true mercantile spirit, – that which made the lorenzo de medicis of old, the gallant discoveries of a subsequent period, and a few independent men of wealth in later times … can exist only at intervals of that nature, – at periods when it grows young again. When mere plodding begins, it is gone; and then comes an alarming time for a nation which has began to be corrupted by a bribing Government … (15 February 1818, p. 97)
In presenting the idea of moral decay within the context of the historical cycle, Hunt is again following reformers such as the neo-Harringtonians and historians such as Gibbon who championed the cyclical view of history. In The Decline and Fall Gibbon largely attributes the empire’s decay and the ‘spirit of disobedience and sedition’ that disrupted the Roman armies to the introduction of luxury, which promotes disobedience and effeminacy in the armies and ruling elite (I, 237; see also III, 201–4). His representation of luxury draws on the classical notion of success inevitably entailing decline, which was used by the opposition to Walpole and revived during times of war or hardship thereafter.21 Hunt’s insistence that it is not commerce itself but luxury and the ‘spirit of gain’ that is at the root of contemporary evils is consistent with representations of commerce by the majority of French, English and Scottish Enlightenment historians and social theorists who for the most part maintained that commerce was essential to the progress of manners and the establishment of the modern European states.22 In his preliminary discussion to The History of Charles V Robertson notes that ‘[t]he progress of commerce had considerable influence in polishing the manners of the European nations’ from the eleventh century onwards and that luxury promoted the development of the elegant arts (I, 76). In his Lectures on Jurisprudence (1762–3), Adam Smith claims that opulence and freedom are ‘the two greatest blessings men can possess’ and that commerce has bolstered freedom and prevented corruption; and in the Wealth of Nations he argues in favour of the kind of ‘universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people’ (I, 13), although he concedes the necessity for some fiscal restrictions (such as taxes on items of luxury) in order to prevent the excessive amassing of wealth (II, 424). Even Adam Ferguson, who was the most concerned by an apparent decline in virtue, repeatedly emphasises in his Essay on the History of Civil Society that commerce and corruption are by no means inherently or inevitably linked.
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Hume saw what he called ‘innocent luxury’ as ‘advantageous to the public’ and he famously argued that the ages of refinement were the most virtuous, and that luxury actually reduced indulgence.23 Voltaire, too, argued in Dictionnaire philosophique that the man of luxury could be seen as a man of sense and industry, and that even if partially injurious luxury could benefit a great nation (Œuvres complètes, 20,15). The ‘vicious’ side of luxury, on the other hand, was characterised by a gross and sensuous indulgence, and was subject to criticism by most commentators.24 In spite of numerous reservations, Hunt, like his Enlightenment predecessors, does not on the whole reject the new world of commercial convenience.25 Nonetheless, his sustained critique of its more extreme or vicious manifestations in the form of luxury, money-getting and commercialism in the Examiner had a profound effect on Keats’s representations of the modern mercantile state in Isabella and Lamia.
‘[T]he bloom-keeping, not the shop-keeping nation’: Love and Commercialism in Isabella Isabella is set in fourteenth-century Florence, but the stark discrepancy between Hunt’s ‘Merry Old England’ and the joyless, mercantile world of the poem only serves to highlight its implicit contemporaneity: while seemingly occupying the feudal world of the ‘old Romance’ (387), Isabella also invokes contemporary social conditions. Lamia, by contrast, is set in ancient Crete and Corinth, but it too is concerned to present the problems of contemporary society while ostensibly keeping to its classical setting. Corinth is the equivalent of a modern city, a site of consumerism, competition and greed. In both poems Keats contrasts the blissful nature of the private world of individual lovers with the hierarchy and corruption of public life. The carefree existence of the Cretan nymph represents the values he associates with the private sphere and the pre-commercial past in Lamia, but it is in Isabella that the distinction between the private and public sphere – between innocence and worldliness – is most pronounced and consistently maintained. Lorenzo’s and Isabella’s relationship is described in terms of an inward, private space of bliss and contentment; and their mutual satisfaction is echoed in the poem’s inner closure (‘tenderer’/‘tenderer’; ‘All close’/‘All close’ (9–10, 81–3)) and the simplicity of its rhyme scheme (‘air’/‘share’, ‘apart’/‘heart’ (73–6)).26 Like ‘Twin roses’ (74) the lovers are so immersed in the ‘inward fragrance’ (76) of each other that they seem oblivious to the outward manifestations of society: their meetings take place ‘All close’ (83) ‘in a bower of hyacinth and musk, / Unknown of any, free from
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whispering tale’ (85–6), and the inherent privacy of their relationship is evident from its secrecy, first from each other and subsequently from the ‘whispering tale’ of the public domain. Their world is not, however, that of Isabella’s exclusive and unsociable brothers who are compared to ‘two close Hebrews in that land inspired’ (131), but is rather associated with the natural, simple pleasures of rural felicity that Hunt attributes to ‘Merry Old England’, and the ages of Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare.27 The simplicity and naturalness of the lovers’ representation in the poem is reminiscent of Hazlitt’s praise of Chaucer’s simplicity in his lecture ‘On Chaucer and Spenser’ (1818), in which he extracts by way of example a passage from Troilus and Cressida – ‘And as the new abashed nightingale, / That stinteth first when she beginneth sing, … Right so, Cresseide, when that he dread stent, / Open’d her heart, and told him her intent’ – arguing that ‘[t]his is so true and natural, and beautifully simple, that the two seem identified with each other’ (HW, V, 20). Keats attended the lecture in February 1818, and similarly endorses the youth and simplicity of ‘poor simple Isabel!’ (1) and her ‘young palmer’ (2) throughout, with nearly every description emphasising their natural and inherent association with each other: ‘Her lute-string gave an echo of his name, / She spoilt her half-done broidery with the same’ (15–16). Images of natural harmony (13–14), domestic bliss (11) and flowers (72, 74, 76) are consistently used to portray the lovers’ relationship; even the subsequent bitterness that accompanies the destruction of their love, at which the poem hints in stanza thirteen, is compared to ‘poison-flowers’ (104). R. S. White has persuasively argued that the pattern of natural growth and decay in Isabella is reminiscent of the cyclical model of natural degeneration in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet, all of which Keats read closely.28 The verbal indebtedness of the poem to Romeo and Juliet in particular has been well documented, but Hazlitt’s comments on the play in his Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays further illuminate its intimate connection with Keats’s poem: ‘The feelings of youth and of the spring are here blended together like the breath of opening flowers’ (HW, IV, 251). Not only does Hazlitt anticipate some of Keats’s key images here (such as the opening of the flower and the connection between youth and spring), but the sensorial and pictorial qualities that he argues are evoked by Shakespeare’s imagery figure prominently in Isabella. Keats’s identification of the young lovers with images of natural growth may also have emanated from his reading of Chaucer and more specifically from Hazlitt’s praise in his lecture on Chaucer and Spenser of a passage from the ‘Knight’s Tale’ in which Emelie is associated with May
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flowers (HW, V, 20–1). The reference to the natural passage of time (‘yere by yere, and day by day’) and the comparison of Emelie to ‘the lilie upon his stalke grene’ and ‘the May with floeres newe’, as well as the reference to ‘the rose-colour’ of her complexion, has obvious echoes in the portrayal of Isabella in Keats’s poem. More generally, however, the use of natural imagery and the emphasis on the value of simplicity highlights the poem’s affinities with Chaucer and Shakespeare, and accordingly with Hunt’s and Hazlitt’s comments on the ‘old school’ of English poetry. For Hazlitt, Shakespeare is the ‘poet of nature’ (HW, V, 46). Similarly, Chaucer’s sentiments are ‘founded on the natural impulses and habitual prejudices of the characters he represents’. He repeatedly emphasises Chaucer’s sincerity – ‘There is an inveteracy of purpose, a sincerity of feeling’ – arguing that ‘Chaucer has more of this deep, internal, sustained sentiment, than any other writer, except Boccaccio’, who was the main source for Isabella (HW, V, 22, 29). The floral imagery associated with Isabella and Lorenzo, as well as their delight in the simple pleasures of domestic comfort, align the lovers not only with the ‘old school’ of English poetry, but also with the virtues of ‘Old England’: the ‘bloom-keeping’ and not the ‘shop-keeping’ nation.29 Florence is described by William Robertson in The History of Charles V as among the first of the European nations to encourage and reap the benefits of commerce (I, 78–9). However, the Florence of Keats’s poem does not represent that happy state of balance between ‘money-getting and festivity’ of the Florence of the ‘lorenzo de medicis of old’. Rather, the larger world that the lovers inhabit is that of a commercial and covetous ‘shop-keeping’ nation. ‘Enriched from ancestral merchandize’ (106), Isabella’s brothers are representative of this public world of commerce and consumerism, and like Hunt’s descriptions of the replacement of sociability with self-interest in the Examiner, their love of trade permeates their entire way of life: Why were they proud? Because their marble founts Gush’d with more blood than do a wretch’s tears?— Why were they proud? Because fair orange-mounts Were of more soft ascent than lazar stairs?— Why were they proud? Because red-lin’d accounts Were richer than the songs of Grecian years?— (121–6)
The brothers’ pride is indistinguishable from the ‘marble founts’, ‘fair orange-mounts’ and ‘red-lin’d accounts’ of their largesse, and Keats’s account of them has much in common with Hunt’s Examiner descriptions of the ‘Sinecurists’, ‘money-getters’, ‘fund-holders’ and ‘Corruptionalists’ who covet more and more in their spirit of over-possession. Many critics
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have noted the change of style and register from the descriptions of Isabella and Lorenzo to those of the brothers in the poem, rightly pointing to the ‘cynical and worldly-wise tone’ of these passages as well as to their ‘eighteenth-century manner of abbreviated grammatical forms suggesting a tendency to abstraction and personification’.30 More specifically, this terse, abbreviated style is the journalistic mode of periodicals and magazines like Hunt’s Examiner. The brothers are referred to as ‘ledgermen’ (137) and ‘money-bags’ (142), both of which are terms similar to those used by Hunt to describe the trading element of contemporary Britain.31 Like the money-getters described in the Examiner, the brothers’ ‘hungry pride and gainful cowardice’ (130) inhibit their ability sympathetically to respond to the plight of others. They are described as ‘self-retired’ (129) and ‘vineyarded from beggar-spies’ (132) and are blind to everything except their own wealth: ‘These gentlemen, with very few exceptions indeed, are as profoundly ignorant as they well can be … They put on guineas for spectacles, and can see nothing else’ (Examiner, 15 February 1818, p. 97). The reference in the poem to the working poor as ‘beggarspies’ brings to mind Hunt’s objections in the Examiner to what he refers to as the ‘slander of the poor’. The seemingly paradoxical idea of the ‘luxury of the poor’ was used by conservatives to suggest that the social evils of poverty were the result of the way of life of the poor themselves.32 In an article for 16 February 1818, Hunt calls this a ‘most offensive style of aristocratical assumption’ (p. 97; see also 18 August 1816, p. 525); and on 23 March 1817 he devotes an entire article to the ‘accusations of immorality and depravity’ that often accompanied conservative discussions of the Poor Laws (p. 181). The brothers’ arrogance, selfishness and lack of sympathy for others are manifested in their savage exploitation of the working poor: ‘And for them many a weary hand did swelt / In torched mines and noisy factories’ (107–8). The references to ‘torched mines’ and ‘noisy factories’, as well as to the ‘weary hand’ and ‘hollow eyes’ (110) of the workers, recall Hunt’s descriptions of the effects of industrialisation. ‘Noisy factories’ evoke his portrayal of factory conditions in an article for 5 April 1818 – ‘instead of birds they hear nothing but the click of combs or the grinding of engines’ – while the ‘torched mines’ recall his frequent allusions to the ‘fiery offerings to Moloch’ (p. 209).33 Like Hunt’s comparisons of industry and torture – ‘and all this lingering torture is called habits of industry’ (p. 210) – the savagery of the brothers’ mercantile capitalism is portrayed as akin to torture: the workers turn ‘an easy wheel, / That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel’ (119–20). The similarities between this section of the poem and Hunt’s articles on
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factory conditions suggest that, at the very least, Keats was drawing on characteristic representations of industrial labour by like-minded political writers of the period. However, Isabella also refers to the effects of commercialism on captive colonial markets as the brothers’ exploitative ventures extend even to the realms of the new world. The ‘Ceylon diver’ (113) and the ‘Half-ignorant’ (119) mass of ‘A thousand men’ (118) clearly allude to the natives of European colonies and to their exploitation by colonial powers: ‘For them the Ceylon diver held his breath, / And went all naked to the hungry shark’ (113–14). As Vincent Newey has pointed out, Ceylon, a relatively new British colony, is the focus here ‘of the inhuman and dehumanizing outreach of Isabella’s brothers’, while the ‘once proud-quiver’d loins’ (109) sifting for gold in the ‘dazzling river’ (111) evokes Robertson’s descriptions of Spanish greed in The History of America (II, 347).34 Hunt’s articles in the Examiner on the British colonies in India and Java are similarly damning in their account of colonial exploitation. In an article for 20 September 1818, he condemns the accepted colonial wisdom that empire respects ‘the more desirable interests of humanity at large’ by ending barbarous customs; and after comparing the English treatment of the Indians to the Inquisition and slavery, he sets out a detailed account of atrocities in India (p. 594). Keats, too, explicitly draws on the exploitative commercialism of both the colonial past and present in order to condemn contemporary greed in Isabella, and his representation of the pervasive quality of the brothers’ commercialism is very similar to Hunt’s portrayal of the effects of rampant commercialism on sociability, sympathy and mutual kindness: ‘the vice of avarice is in its essence base, unsocial, and exclusive; it arises from an admiration of nothing beautiful; it belongs to no glad or gladdening impulses; it is never even connected with a generous error; it gets all, denies all, and disgusts all’ (Examiner, 26 April 1818, p. 258). With the ‘unhappy cunning’ that Hunt associates with ‘money-getters’, Isabella’s ‘covetous’ and ‘sly’ brothers see ‘east and west’ and ‘spy’ out the lovers’ ‘downy nest’ (141, 142, 137, 138).35 They consider Lorenzo’s love of Isabella a crime because it debases class distinctions and, hoping to marry her ‘[t]o some high noble and his olive-trees’ (168), they decide to kill Lorenzo. As Nicholas Roe has noted, the brothers’ actions have strong associations with Hunt’s poem The Story of Rimini, in which Hunt similarly emphasises the danger of ‘confounding forms with justice, of setting authorized selfishness above the most natural impulses’. The order imposed on Ravenna by Giovanni, lord of Rimini, in the poem is oppressive and self-interested, and the people of Ravenna are presented as equally selfish and greedy.36 Hunt promotes instead natural impulses over the habits of falsehood and selfishness, just as in Isabella Keats advocates
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honesty, simplicity and individual happiness over cunning, self-interest and institutionalised values. The poem thus demonstrates the way ‘authorized selfishness’ in the form of social norms or institutions will attack what threatens its interests or authority.37 A union between Isabella and Lorenzo is not only a threat to established class norms, but also to property values, and the brothers’ love of money operates at the expense of every other human emotion. Even their slaughter of Lorenzo is figured in terms of wealth: ‘Each richer by his being a murderer’ (224). Isabella is made aware of her lover’s death by a vision of Lorenzo killed by ‘the murderous spite / Of pride and avarice’ (293–4). As Apollo is taught to ‘think of the earth’ by Moneta in The Fall of Hyperion, and as Madeline becomes aware of pain and suffering in The Eve of St. Agnes, so Isabella is educated in the cruel realities of life by Lorenzo’s death. However, as Daniel Watkins has noted, in this case Keats locates Isabella’s misery specifically within the public sphere and portrays the incompatibility of the lovers’ world of natural harmony with the world of money-getting: ‘“Ha! ha!” said she, “I knew not this hard life, / I thought the worst fate was simple misery; / … Sweet Spirit, thou hast school’d my infancy”’ (329–30, 334). Isabella’s placing of Lorenzo’s head in the pot of basil similarly intimates the way in which a corrupt society can defeat pleasure and desire. Isabella worships the pot fanatically and in so doing loses all awareness of the world in which she lives: ‘And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun, / And she forgot the blue above the trees’ (417–18).38 The personally, but also socially, destructive effect of Isabella’s worship of her pot of basil recalls Hunt’s description of the negative effects of fanaticism and superstition on society, to which, along with commercialism and utilitarianism, he attributes England’s decline in sociability. In his ‘Merry-Makings’ article he repeatedly associates established religion with fanaticism and superstition; and throughout the Examiner, he draws attention to what he sees as the increasingly reactionary nature of religion. When describing the demise of rural pleasures in the ‘Merry-Makings’ article, for example, he refers to the destructive effect of religious bigotry on sympathy, love, mutual kindness and natural animal passion, all of which have become degraded into lust (Examiner, 10 May 1818, p. 291). Isabella’s fanatical spiritual commitment to her pot of basil, while not explicitly religious in nature, is nonetheless suggestive of the dangers of bigotry and excessive inward feeling. She is neither spiritually nor physically sustained by the worship of her basil, but rather ‘withers, like a palm / Cut by an Indian for its juicy balm’ (447–8). The imagery of poison, sickness and disease in the poem, and the accompanying argument that love-sickness, in effect, becomes social
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sickness, is usually accounted for by Keats’s medical training.39 But the idea of disease and social sickness also permeates writing on political economy in the period and provides an alternative explanation for the poem’s imagery of fading lovers and poison flowers. The combined effect on society of commerce and excessive inward feeling presents a sharp contrast from the simple world of natural pleasures described earlier in the poem. In its final scenes, as in The Eve of St. Agnes, the domestic context in which the characters exist implodes, leaving nothing that is meaningful, whether private or public, except the lingering effect of the tale itself. The demise of the simple, natural world of rural felicity is made explicit as the poet longs for the ‘gentleness of old Romance’ with its ‘simple plaining of a minstrel’s song!’ (387, 388). The poem is set in the world of the old romance, yet it is as far from the values Hunt and Hazlitt connect with that time as contemporary England. The simplicity and beauty that characterised the brief love between Lorenzo and Isabella are ultimately overcome by a world of ‘wormy circumstance’ (385) where a love of money-getting and excessive individualism exists at the expense of real social interaction and human sympathy.
Lamia and the Luxury Debate If Isabella is a graphic portrayal of the way in which selfish commercialism deadens individual human morality and compassion, Lamia is concerned to present the dangers of the ‘mighty cost and blaze of wealth’ (II, 198) for society as a whole. The poem’s initial Cretan setting represents an idealised world in contrast to the mercantile Corinth to which it subsequently moves. Watkins sees the move from Crete to Corinth as a shift from prehistory to history or ‘from a relatively rural, idyllic (and idealized) moment out of time to a more frantic moment within a highly competitive, demanding and manipulative situation’. Similarly, Levinson has described the poem’s movement as a transition from nature to culture or ‘from a naturally egalitarian community to a hierarchical, institutionally articulated formulation; and, from easy, universal prosperity to the fetish form and its corresponding political structure’. She rightly sees the poem as ‘an allegory about the evolution of value forms and their corresponding social forms’, but a movement from an idealised pre-modern order defined by harmony and unity to a modern commercial world in which wealth and ostentation are the dominant values can also be read as the expression of a theory of entropy or historical decline centred around the idea of luxury.40 Keats would have been aware of the association of commerce with
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luxury and decline not only from the Examiner, but also from his reading of eighteenth-century histories such as Robertson’s History of Charles V, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Hooke’s Roman History (1738–71) and Vertot’s Roman Revolutions (1719), as well as from classical authors such as Plutarch, Cicero and Livy.41 Whether or not Gibbon and other eighteenth-century historians wished to draw tight connections between the decay of Rome and that of contemporary Britain, social commentators in the period frequently used the example of Rome as a warning about the dangers of luxury and arbitrary power as the implications of colonial power, pension schemes, speculation and warmongering became ever more apparent.42 An awareness of the poem’s connections with contemporary historiographical debates about corruption, decline and luxury offers a number of solutions to long-standing interpretive problems, the first of which concerns the apparent inconsistency between the opening section of the poem and the remainder of the narrative; the second, the unresolved tension between philosophy and the imagination.43 Lamia represents an attack on luxury in that it presents and criticises each of the five key elements traditionally associated with classical models of luxury.44 In the Cretan section of the poem, Keats depicts the law (which defines the threshold of luxury and controls what is socially permissible), the object of testing or temptation and the tempter. In this context, the nymph and Lycius are objects of temptation or transgression to which Hermes and Lamia succumb. Lamia herself is both a victim and an agent of temptation. She simultaneously surrenders to the temptation of Lycius and facilitates the seduction of the nymph. Her role as the symbolic incarnation of luxury and excess – ‘Lamia is the fetish – gold, commodity, money, Pythagorean number’ – is somewhat complicated by Keats’s sympathy for her desire for humanity, but the subsequent section of the poem set in Corinth nonetheless goes on to depict the effects of luxury on imperfect human nature and the punishment or control of luxury, usually represented in the classical tradition by the progression from access to all good things to access to few or none.45 The essential innocence of the initial Cretan setting is evident from Lamia’s description of the carefree world of the nymph, who exists in a natural and timeless world of pleasure: Free as the air, invisibly, she strays About these thornless wilds; her pleasant days She tastes unseen; unseen her nimble feet Leave traces in the grass and flowers sweet; From weary tendrils, and bow’d branches green, She plucks the fruit unseen, she bathes unseen: (I, 94–9)
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This representation of Crete is suggestive of a kind of Eden, providing an appropriate context for the subsequent acts of transgression that take place. Everything connected with the nymph is characterised by ease and pleasure: the wilds are ‘thornless’ and the ‘branches green’ bow low for her to reach their fruit. The references to her invisibility as well as the repetition of the word ‘unseen’ are indicative of her unselfconscious identity and the organicism of her way of being: the nymph is aligned with nature’s cyclical patterns and has no thought of past or future. The repeated allusions in the opening of the poem to flowers and greenery (I, 6, 12, 18, 27, 95–9), and the emphasis on the private nature of the nymph’s domain (‘unseen’ by ‘unlovely eyes’ (I, 99, 102)), parallel Keats’s representation of the private world of the lovers in Isabella rather than the unsociable and exclusive ‘self-retirement’ of Isabella’s brothers. Free from compromise, negotiation and possession (both of the sexual and material kind), she exemplifies the life of liberty and pleasure referred to in Hunt’s article on ‘Merry-Makings’. Her wanderings and ‘nimble feet’ evoke the ‘greens and gambols’ and other ‘leisures’ described by Hunt as characteristic of traditional holidays such as May Day. Crete, it seems, is redolent with the values of sociability that he associates with England’s past, and its ‘thornless wilds’ appear far removed from the joyless, commercial world of contemporary England and from the material excess of the subsequent section of the poem set in Corinth.46 Keats’s representation of Crete is not, however, one of unmitigated nostalgia. The main action of the poem may be set in a mythic past but ‘it defines that past by reference to the corrupt historicity which directly succeeds it’.47 Moreover, Lamia complicates the idealisation of the precommercial past by introducing the idea of decline within Crete itself. In the first instance, Keats emphasises the fragility of the nymph’s liberty: she requires protection from ‘love-glances’ (I, 102) and the whims ‘Of Satyrs, Fauns, and blear’d Silenus’ sighs’ (I, 103), and her way of life continues only as a direct result of Lamia’s arbitrary protection (I, 100–9). The nymph’s liberty is also curtailed by the very conditions that typify the world she inhabits. As with the Titan society in Hyperion, the Cretan world order is characterised not only by innocence and harmony, but also by a strict hierarchy: Lamia is accountable to Hermes, who himself recognises the law of Jove, ‘his great summoner’ (I, 11). In the world of the poem it is the ancient order of Jove that defines the terms and conditions of existence, and Hermes’ secrecy regarding his pursuit of the nymph and his unhappiness with the conditions set down by Olympus are suggestive of the authoritarianism of the Olympian order (I, 70–6).48 Hermes’ desire to possess the nymph deafens him to the harmony of the natural law symbolised by Apollo’s ‘long, long melodious moan’ (I, 75)
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and induces him to transform Lamia from lamiae to woman. It is significant that when Hermes first sees Lamia she is ‘a palpitating snake’ (I, 45). Unlike the Titans in Hyperion, who fall ‘by course of Nature’s law’ and must acquiesce to the apparently undeniable forces of fate, the disorder in Crete is an internal problem from within ‘The taller grasses and full-flowering weed’ (I, 44) of Cretan society itself. The original Fall is suggested by Lamia’s transformation from woman to snake (I, 117) and Burton’s account of the Lamia myth in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) (originally printed at the end of the poem) exposes Lamia as a serpent or lamiae, thereby invoking both pagan and Christian symbols of temptation. As Susan Wolfson has argued, Lamia’s craftiness, sensuousness and rhetorical ability all suggest that she is a figure of transgression – ‘Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self’ (I, 56) – as do Keats’s numerous references to Milton’s Satan.49 Crete’s social order is clearly undermined by the commercial nature of Lamia’s transformation and entry into the world of mortals as Lamia, in effect, trades the nymph with Hermes for Lycius.50 However, Keats’s characterisation of Lamia relates not only to commercialism, but also to characteristics associated with luxury and in particular with the luxurious east. Apart from the obvious comparisons between Lamia and exotic animals such as the zebra, leopard and peacock (I, 47–50), the reference to Lamia’s ‘gordian shape’ (I, 47) recalls the gordian knot, the master of which would rule all of Asia.51 Moreover, the description of Lamia’s ‘dazzling hue’ (I, 47) takes its inspiration from the shades of dyes associated with the luxurious eastern silk trade discussed by Robertson in The History of Charles V (I, 330–1) and by Gibbon in chapter 40 of The Decline and Fall (IV, 69–79), which likewise plays an important role in the characterisation of Porphyro in The Eve of St. Agnes.52 Lamia’s transformation by Hermes into female form is also recounted in terms of the gold, silver and precious stones that Gibbon and Robertson associate with trade with the east. In The Decline and Fall Gibbon describes the avarice and luxury of Mahmud’s eastern empire: ‘The Orientals exceed the measure of credibility in the account of millions of gold and silver, such as the avidity of man has never accumulated; in the magnitude of pearls, diamonds, and rubies, such as have never been produced by the workmanship of nature’ (V, 650). The references to Lamia’s ‘silver mail, and golden brede’, ‘sapphires, greens, and amethyst’ and ‘rubious-argent’ (I, 158, 162, 163) all allude to objects commonly associated in the eighteenth century with eastern luxury and ostentation.53 As Keats would have been aware from his reading of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Livy’s History of Rome and Plutarch’s Lives, luxury was considered to have played major role in the republic’s decline. In the annalistic
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tradition represented by Livy, among others, luxury initially affects Rome after the army’s campaigns in Asia in 187 bc, and many of the Roman historians saw the east as the primary source of the empire’s decline.54 The first Romans were frugal, but luxury and the love of riches spread rapidly from the nobles to the army, and from the city to the provinces and the people, corrupting not only officials and great men, but the manners and morals of the Romans more generally. In this context, Lamia’s powers of seduction can be seen as relating to material as well as sexual excess. Moreover, her transformation into a woman invokes the classical association between luxury and women. Livy, for example, refers to Cato’s oration against the extravagance of women as marking the beginning of the spread of luxury in Rome, noting that Cato was able to overrule objections to the Voconian law which prevented women from owning property: ‘In time, so strongly did he inveigh against female weakness, and so lively point out their excesses, when Mistresses of large Fortunes, that he extorted a general consent …’ For Plutarch, too, women cause the proliferation of luxury in the capital, as in, for example, ‘Marcus Cato’ in the Lives.55 So insistent was the association of luxury with women that from the seventeenth century onwards, luxury largely came to be represented by three female figures: Eve, Worldly Temptation or Fleshly Pleasure, and Dame Luxury.56 Lamia’s transformation is therefore significant on a number of levels: first, she is connected with the mythic associations of the female lamiae that Burton describes; second, she evokes the traditional Christian association of Eve and temptation; and third, she represents excess through the classical association of luxury with women. Lamia is therefore the symbol of all of the commercial, religious and philosophical elements that destroy the social stability of Crete. She not only facilitates Hermes’ possession of the nymph, but also undermines the natural law by inducing Hermes to transform her into a mortal woman. On the one hand, Lamia is an agent of corruption or temptation in an idyllic or edenic world, and the serpentine nature of her character can certainly be read allegorically in terms of the myth of the Fall; but the connections between her characterisation and representations of commerce and luxury in contemporary political and historical controversy are too insistent to overlook.57 Like England, Crete is declining towards corruption and must be rescued by revitalising its constitution and first principles. One of the most pressing of the poem’s interpretive problems, the disjunction between the Crete and Corinth sections, can therefore be explained by Keats’s poetic rendering of a model of historical decline. The opening section of the poem contextualises the rest of the poem within a theory of entropy which explains how a society can lose its innocence and fall into corruption.
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The transition from Crete to Corinth involves the accompanying transformation of pre-commercial life into commercial life, but the emphasis of the second part of the poem is on ostentation and luxury rather than on commerce itself. As many commentators have pointed out, in Corinth the ‘fretted splendour’ (II, 137) of Lamia’s palace is shocking, and visitors are amazed at the ‘minist’ring slaves’, ‘silken couches’, ‘gorgeous dyes’ and ‘baskets of bright osier’d gold’ (II, 193, 197, 205, 217). Keats once again associates Lamia’s luxury with commodities from the east and also America, including silk, dyes, gold and exotic trees: ‘Fresh carved cedar, mimicking a glade / Of palm and plantain’ (II, 125–6). In the representations of the palace and banquet, he draws on his reading of John Scott’s edition of The Arabian Nights (1811) and Henry Weber’s Tales of the East (1812), the opulent and luxurious banqueting room being a regular feature of oriental stories.58 However, Keats’s representation of Lamia’s palace has another likely source in his copy of Vertot’s Roman Revolutions, in the ‘Introductory Discourse’ to which Vertot describes the almost ‘magical’ spread of luxury in Rome which happens not gradually or by degrees but all at once: All these Riches flow’d to Rome. Rivers of Gold, or to speak more properly, the purest Blood of the people ran thither from all the Provinces, and carried along with it the most terrible luxury. There arose of a sudden, and as it were by inchantment, magnificent Palaces, whose Walls, Roofs, and Ceilings were all gilded …
Vertot goes on to describe ‘the Magnificence of their Buildings, the Richness of their habits, the Jewels they wore, the prodigious Number of Slaves, Freedmen, and Clients, by whom they were constantly attended, and especially the Expense and Profusion of their Tables’ in a way that is reminiscent of Keats’s descriptions of Lamia’s gilded palace.59 Like the riches of Isabella’s brothers, Lamia’s wealth results in a denial of public and social commitment. Surrounded by wealth, everything but Lycius becomes unimportant to her: ‘there they reposed, / Where use had made it sweet, with eyelids closed, / Saving a tythe which love still open kept, / That they might see each other while they almost slept’ (II, 22–5). Keats’s representation of the lovers in repose is reminiscent of a famous passage from The History of Charles V, in which Robertson describes the effects of luxury on the Roman Emperors: The Emperors, who had the absolute direction of this disordered system, sunk in the softness of Eastern luxury, shut up within the walls of a palace, ignorant of war, unacquainted with affairs, and governed entirely by women and eunuchs, or by ministers equally effeminate, trembled at the approach of danger, and under circumstances which called for the utmost vigour in counsel
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as well as in action, discovered all the impotent resolution of fear, and of folly. (I, 8)
Luxury is represented here as eastern and effeminate, both of which are the overriding qualities of Keats’s representation of Lamia, whose dominion is similarly confined to ‘a palace’ (II, 3) where Lycius is induced into the ‘dull shade / Of deep sleep’ (II, 104–5), unacquainted with the affairs of ‘the noisy world almost forsworn’ (II, 33).60 As in Isabella, the excessive privatisation of life in this manner cannot survive: ‘Love in a palace is perhaps at last / More grievous torment than a hermit’s fast’ (II, 3–4). However, the wider world of Corinth is no better than the private seclusion of Lamia and Lycius. Corinth is a corrupt society with ‘temples lewd’ (I, 352) and ‘wealthy festivals’ (I, 358), and Keats establishes a world of self-interest and consumerism. The public in Lamia is clearly ‘saturated with the spirit of appetite’: ‘The herd approach’d; each guest, with busy brain, / Arriving at the portal, gaz’d amain, / … So in they hurried all, maz’d, curious and keen’ (II, 150–1, 156).61 Lycius, too, is part of this competitive society (II, 62) and wants to parade the luxurious fruits of his relationship with Lamia to his neighbours. Wholly in accordance with Hunt’s depiction of the effects of consumerism in the Examiner, everyone and everything in Corinth is tainted by the evils that accompany the amassing of wealth. Lamia and Apollonius are polar opposites within this consumer society.62 Lamia is representative of material excess, the appeal of the senses and the imaginative power to create illusions, while Apollonius is characterised by his denial of pleasure and his appeal to the intellect. The battle for Lycius’s soul is most often portrayed as a conflict between philosophy and the imagination, but the emphasis on Lamia’s ostentation and excess as well as Keats’s use of the figure of Apollonius to highlight that excess once again points to a different analysis of the poem centred on the concept of luxury. The character of Apollonius was modelled on Burton’s description of Apollonius of Tyana in Asia Minor, a Pythagorean philosopher of the first century ad, who upheld strict moral and religious reform, and was also credited with magical powers. Bayle in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) ascribes to Apollonius magical powers, although he also emphasises the philosopher’s fraudulent nature, claiming that, as an imposter and magician, he pretended to be capable of miracles and did not disclaim the title of God. Moreover, he notes that Apollonius renounced wine, women, animal food, shoes, dancing and other volatile diversions.63 Marilyn Butler has argued that Lycius’s speech in response to Apollonius (‘“Shut, shut those juggling eyes, thou rutheless man!”’ (II, 277)) is ‘a call on behalf of the pagan’ and a ‘challenge to Christian
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asceticism’, but Keats’s attack in the poem is by no means limited to Christian extremism.64 The Apollonian tradition, which includes philosophers as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Hesiod and Herodotus, also taught that necessity and morality were more important than individual rights, and that pleasure and happiness were subject to limitations. In book four of The Republic Plato argues that the happiness of the polis is more important than the happiness of individuals or individual classes. He also argues that extremes of wealth and poverty will undermine the polis because wealth is the parent of luxury, and poverty of meanness and viciousness; and in book eight, he maintains that civil strife arises from envy and hostility towards differentials in economic classes.65 Luxury is therefore ‘as threatening to the Apollonian ideal of sophrosyne’ as it is to the Christian principles of sacrifice and obedience.66 In the Apollonian tradition the temptation to luxury is described not as an anti-god seeking to thwart the divine will, but as a constant element of human psychology and human nature. Lamia and Apollonius can therefore be seen as representing opposite drives in man’s psychology: Apollonius’s power is that of ‘cold philosophy’ (II, 230) that would ‘clip an Angel’s wings’ (II, 234); Lamia’s power is her appeal to the senses and physical gratification.67 However, Apollonius’s attempt to liberate rational freedom from the passion and prejudice of luxury is presented in the poem as excessive and ultimately destructive: ‘Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy?’ (II, 229–30). In the final passages of the poem his ‘juggling eyes’ (II, 277) and shrieks (II, 269) are reminiscent of Lamia herself, suggesting that his philosophy, like hers, is a false one. Indeed, in many ways he is ‘[m]ore predatory a creature than either Hermes or Lamia, for his prey is beauty’.68 Keats touches on the idea of true and false philosophy in his journal letter to his brother and sister-in-law of 14 February–3 May 1819, in which he notes that ‘our reasoning[s] … though erroneous … may be fine—This is the very thing in which consists poetry; and if so it is not so fine a thing as philosophy—For the same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as truth’ (LJK, II, 80–1). Poetic reasoning may be erroneous and therefore ‘untrue’, but philosophic reasoning must be held up to the highest standards of exactness and truthfulness. Keats’s distinction between true and false philosophy, and his representation of Apollonius as a juggler or conjuror, brings to mind Hume’s argument that philosophers do not so much struggle with the concepts of good and evil, but with the even more fundamental concepts of reality and illusion: ‘The philosopher … by an act of reflection opens up a distinction between appearance and reality, magically transforming the whole of experience into a favourite part’.69 In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Hume
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calls this ‘philosophical chemistry’ and in ‘The Sceptic’, published in the 1742 second edition of the first volume of Essays Moral and Political, he compares it to witchcraft.70 The representation of Apollonius at the end of the poem as a juggling ‘conjuror’ or sorcerer, and his attempt to illuminate for Lycius the illusion of Lamia’s world by an appeal to reason, establishes him as a ‘philosopher’ in the Humean sense. However, Keats presents Apollonius’s philosophy as a ‘false’ philosophy which, although based on reason, is divorced from the true realities and principles of human life.71 In part four of book one of a Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Hume distinguishes between true and false philosophy. As Donald Livingston has pointed out, he represents ‘true philosophy’ as a ‘three-stage theory’ in which philosophical reflection first emerges from the prejudices of common life. It thereupon falls into self-alienation and incoherence, but finally wins a true understanding of itself, leading to a reconciliation with the prejudices of common life from which it originated. False philosophy, on the other hand, is not reconciled with the prejudices of common life but constructs a theoretical world in total opposition to the world of custom. This world, according to Hume, is an illusion (Treatise, pp. 269, 26). In ‘The Sceptic’ he describes the way in which the philosopher tends to extend his favourite principle ‘over the whole of creation’ through ‘the most violent and absurd reasoning’, in effect, suggesting that the false philosopher is a fanatic, applying one principle to all cases and examples. Similarly, in the Treatise he argues that philosophy has an appetite for the absurd and fanatical. False philosophical consciousness throws the philosopher into a profound state of self-alienation or ‘philosophical melancholy and delirium’ (Treatise, p. 269).72 Livingston distinguishes three forms of false philosophical existence in Hume’s work, which he calls ‘ascetic philosophical existence’, ‘revolutionary philosophical existence’ and ‘guilty philosophical existence’. He represents these categories as operating within a system of interplay: ‘The alienated existence of the false philosopher, caught in two contrary worlds, gives rise to alternating feelings of radical self-sufficiency and implacable hostility to the world of custom on the one hand and to feelings of morbid self-disgust for being a participant in it on the other … Here autonomous reason is in implacable opposition to the prejudices.’ 73 Keats’s characterisation of Apollonius in Lamia is remarkably similar to Hume’s representation of the ‘false’ philosopher. Apollonius exhibits an hostility to the human world of luxury and excess, a contempt towards its inhabitants (‘“Fool!” said the sophist, in an under-tone / Gruff with contempt’ (II, 291–2)), and an almost fanatical hatred of Lamia (‘“Begone, foul dream!”’ (II, 271)). He is unable to make any com-
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promises with the world around him (‘“Fool! Fool!” repeated he, while his eyes still / Relented not, nor mov’d’ (II, 295–6)), and does not attempt to understand human love or passion. In his essay ‘On the Tendency of Sects’ for The Round Table Hazlitt similarly declares that ‘a contempt for the habits and manners of the world is as prejudicial as a contempt for their opinions’ (HW, IV, 50) when he considers the related problem of sectarianism: The extreme stress laid upon differences of minor importance, to the neglect of more general truths and broader views of things, gives an inverted bias to the understanding; and this bias is continually increased by the eagerness of controversy, and captious hostility to the prevailing system. (HW, IV, 47)
Hazlitt describes the members of a sect as feeling ‘invulnerable behind the double fence of sympathy with themselves, and antipathy towards the rest of the world’. Like Hume’s false philosophers, ‘they become equally intolerant with respect to the opinions of others, and tenacious of their own. They fortify themselves within the narrow circle of their new-fangled prejudices’ (HW, IV, 48). Levinson has noted Apollonius’s desire to possess Lycius, to secure his love, loyalty and following; in other words, to secure his membership in the Apollonian sect.74 Keats’s ambivalence towards both Lamia and Apollonius and, by implication, towards the values they represent suggests that he does not see salvation either in the denial of pleasure or in an abandonment to the gratification of the senses. As Voltaire argues in Dictionnaire philosophique, excess is universally pernicious whether it relates to abstinence or gluttony, parsimony or profusion: ‘Si par le luxe vous entendez l’excès, on sait que l’excès est pernicieux en tout genre: dans l’abstinence comme dans la gourmandise; dans l’économie comme dans la libéralité’ (Œuvres complètes, 20, 17). Ultimately, both the values associated with luxury and those associated with asceticism are like the ‘false’ pleasure and virtue that Hunt distinguishes from ‘real’ pleasure and virtue in his ‘Merry-Makings’ article: They [pleasure and virtue] have no more right to be kept asunder, than inclination; but the world has made so many artificial Pleasures and Virtues, and taken such extraordinary pains to separate the two ideas … that, by selfish pretenders or foolish mistakers, real Pleasure is almost always lost as much sight of as the Golden Age itself; while real Virtue is too often defined by those, who just see far enough to detect the false. The reason is that Virtue is too much made to consist of compromises with really vicious and foolish and overworked states of society, which of necessity cannot attain to pleasure … (4 January 1818, p. 2)
Hunt endorses the values associated with positive luxury and pleasure
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while decrying negative luxury and avarice, thereby attacking luxury but opposing the conservative values traditionally associated with that attack.75 Lamia’s ultimate socio-political message is similar in its distinction between true and false virtue, as Martin Akse’s insightful comparison of Apollonius’s philosophy with Bentham’s ‘resentment of pleasure’ suggests.76 Keats joins Hunt, Hazlitt, Shelley and Smith, amongst others, in condemning those ascetic doctrines which, according to Smith, place ‘virtue in the entire extirpation and annihilation of all our passions’ (Sentiments, p. 313). Isabella and Lamia demonstrate the way in which societies can fall into decline through an over-emphasis on the values associated with commercialism and luxury. In Lamia, the idealised world of Crete is overwhelmed by a commercial transaction, while Corinth is represented as a modern commercial society in which the ascendancy of two ‘false’ and competing values – luxury and asceticism – result in corruption and decline. The contemporary implications of Keats’s depiction of Corinth and also of the pervasive effect of money-getting in Isabella suggests that he sees the contrast between sincerity and commercialism in the poems as emblematic of an early nineteenth-century decline in sociability and sympathetic understanding. He seems largely to reject Enlightenment conceptions of wealth-creation – in particular, the selfish privatisation of interests that accompanies the modern commercial state – but he nonetheless draws on the vocabulary of eighteenth-century political economy in order to explore that theme. In both poems, Keats uses the private and domestic sphere as a basis for criticising the public world while also portraying the dangers of excessive inward feeling. Isabella may become schooled in the harsh realities of life, but her response is to forget the world. Her fanatical reverence for her pot of basil at the expense of all else destroys sympathy and love by fetishising the object of her desire. Lamia and Lycius lock themselves in their palace, equally oblivious to the world around them, and their relationship proves to be just as ‘false’ as the ideologies represented by the ‘envious race’ of the public arena or by Apollonius’s ‘cold philosophy’. Neither Isabella nor Lamia endorses without irony the experience of their lovers. Love in a climate of commerce is, it seems, ultimately untenable. Excessive consumerism, luxury and commercialism result in the replacement of collective life by destructively individualist values, their pervasive effects extending even to the private world of the heart.
Chapter 5
Moral Philosophy: Sympathetic Identification, Utility and the Natural History of Religion in The Fall of Hyperion When he abandoned Hyperion in May 1819 Keats cast off a model of history that seemed tentatively able to negotiate between stadial and sympathetic modes of representation. The question remains why he decided two months later to revise the fragment as The Fall Of Hyperion, which he had also ‘given up’ by September 1819 (LJK, II, 167). Some commentators have argued that the answer lies in his growing awareness of history’s resistance to any authoritative frame of reference, even the ‘humanised alternative’ to progressive history.1 The poem’s dream framework is indeed suggestive of the difficulties he faced in completing a progress poem in the standard or traditional sense and perfectly ‘captures the dizzying and unreal sensation of experiencing radical historical change’, but its primary shift of emphasis is not from humanism to indeterminacy.2 Like Hyperion, The Fall is structured around the trope of development, and while its focus is on the poet’s (rather than Apollo’s) maturation through suffering, it nonetheless draws on Enlightenment natural histories of philosophy and religion, and hence on debates about the development of human understanding and the nature of conscience, in order to present the progression from uncivilised and selfish ‘dreamer’ to cultivated and humane ‘poet’. In the induction to the poem, Keats characterises the dreamer or ‘false’ poet in terms of the primitive developmental stage of the savage and fanatic, arguing, like Enlightenment historians and philosophers from Voltaire to Hume, that superstition and fanaticism correspond to pre-modern levels of understanding. By defining the ‘true’ poet as one who is able to progress beyond his own self-referential visions towards a more humane, sympathetic and cultivated understanding, he not only represents the moral virtues of empathy and humanity as the product of a more civilised stage of development, but also defends poetry and visionary understanding more generally from claims that it is not a socially significant or responsible act.
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Keats’s vindication of poetry on the grounds of social and humanitarian relevance has obvious resonances with Shelley’s more ideologically-driven account of poetic responsibility in his Defence of Poetry (1821). Shelley famously invited Keats to stay with him in Italy in July 1820 and, although Keats declined the invitation, Jeffrey Cox has demonstrated the extent to which he remained on Shelley’s mind in the months before he wrote the Defence, arguing that the essay was part of Shelley’s ‘ongoing meditation on Keats’ and that it was a response to Keats’s letter of 16 August 1820 in which he urges Shelley to ‘serve Mammon’ and to ‘curb’ his ‘magnanimity’ in favour of a ‘“self concentration”’ (LJK, II, 322–3). While Cox acknowledges that the idea of selfishness contradicts Keats’s stated aesthetic philosophy, he nonetheless argues that the Defence is a direct attack on Keats’s chameleon-like inability to commit to a genuine ideological programme or platform.3 Susan Wolfson makes a similar argument in relation to Hyperion, suggesting that Keats’s primary deviation from Milton’s Paradise Lost is that, for Milton, ‘the moral character’ of a ‘situation informs its emotional drama’, whereas ‘for Keats, the artistry that brings these emotions to life is the chief strength of the writing’; in other words, Keats pays ‘less attention to moral cause than to aesthetic effect’. She too cites Keats’s letter to Shelley about The Cenci, in which he argues that ‘dramatic effect’ is considered by many ‘the mammon’, but that ‘an artist must serve Mammon’ (LJK, II, 322).4 Wolfson’s argument, while true for Hyperion, is a useful point of departure for a discussion of The Fall, which differs from its predecessor precisely in the way that it privileges its moral message over its dramatic effect. Shelley may reject the hierarchy of social usefulness established in The Fall for a more encompassing definition of the poet as philosopher, reformer and legislator, but both writers argue for the social relevance of visionary experience; and the two ‘defences’ share an interest in the ethical and moral implications of poetry. It is by now a commonplace that The Fall is more concerned with the poet’s reaction to the history of the Titans’ overthrow or with the response to sorrow than with the narrative of sorrow itself. Numerous critics have noted that Apollo’s lesson in Hyperion is resumed in The Fall as the poet’s lesson, ‘ritualistically repeating’ its epic subject matter in the figure of the poet.5 The poet is also, however, the spectator of his own conduct. As Michael O’Neill has astutely pointed out, his primary duty ‘is to bear witness to his concern to bear witness’.6 The poem’s epistemological shift and its essential difference from Hyperion is therefore only in part a Wordsworthian-style shift from tale to spectator or from the objective to the subjective treatment of myth, as Keats extends the Wordsworthian trope of observation in order to illustrate the kind of sympathetic
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identification that is based on active sensory participation rather than the less participatory mode of affective spectatorship that emerges in Hyperion.7 In a line of reasoning that is suggestively close to the principal argument of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, the poem argues for the importance of sympathetic identification in the foundation of moral judgements: the poet’s ability sympathetically to enter into and feel the pain of the Titans reflects back to him his own ethical role as a model poet; and by acting as a kind of impartial observer, he is able to make judgements about his own previously self-interested and self-referential conduct. Put simply, The Fall and, to a lesser extent, Endymion present in poetic form something similar to the Smithian process of interpersonal and consequently social growth inspired by sympathy, suffering and fellow-feeling. The poem’s emphasis on a participatory as well as a spectatorial model of moral judgement indicates the extent to which the period’s ideas about moral philosophy and human action were informed by the idea of psychic projection.8 As James Chandler has pointed out, Smith’s idea of the ‘like situation’ was central to theories of the imagination in the early nineteenth century, and The Theory of Moral Sentiments is only the most detailed and theoretical version of an idea that permeates aesthetic and moral philosophy in the long eighteenth century, from the work of Hutcheson, Hume and Kames to that of Hazlitt, Shelley, Byron and Keats.9 The first section of this chapter considers the extent to which Enlightenment theories of moral philosophy inform Keats’s own ideas about human understanding and moral judgement, before examining in the second section the sociological frameworks that formally structure The Fall. The third section considers the relationship between beauty and utility in Shelley’s Defence and Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, arguing that the assimilation or reconciliation of poetry and social utility is also one of The Fall’s most important implicit concerns.
Hutcheson, Smith and Hazlitt: Enlightenment Moral Philosophy and Theories of Human Understanding In 1817 Keats went to Oxford to visit his friend Benjamin Bailey, who was working on a philosophical treatise called ‘An Essay on the Moral Principle’. Robert Ryan has convincingly argued that Bailey derived many of his ideas on the nature of conscience from Enlightenment ‘moral sense’ philosophers such as Shaftesbury, Reid and, in particular, Francis Hutcheson; and he has traced in Keats’s argument for ‘a Life of Sensations
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rather than of Thoughts’ (LJK, I, 185) Hutcheson’s rejection of ethical rationalism and his idea in An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) that both moral distinctions and aesthetic appreciation are based on feelings or sensations, and are therefore ‘senses’. Hutcheson divides the senses into the ‘direct’ or ‘antecedent’ and the ‘reflex’ or ‘consequent’, arguing that harmony, beauty, aesthetic appreciation and morality are ‘reflex’ rather than direct or external senses. In A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1747) he puts forward the related argument that our sense of good and evil is natural and universal, and that it is connected to our sense of beauty; in other words, our sensations of the beauty of the world lead us to acknowledge the existence of a benevolent deity. This idea of beauty as an internal sense analogous to man’s moral conscience illuminates Keats’s comment that ‘[w]hat the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth’ (LJK, I, 184). As Ryan rightly points out, Keats is arguing here both for an ‘immediate perception of the beautiful that does not depend on any process of rational deduction’ (that is, for ‘a Life of Sensations’) and for an understanding of beauty that is directly linked to our capacity for moral benevolence.10 As previously noted, Keats also read Hazlitt’s An Essay on the Principles of Human Action while visiting Bailey in Oxford and its influence on many of the key terms in his aesthetic vocabulary has long been acknowledged. David Bromwich, for example, has rightly reminded us that Hazlitt’s work on associationism both here and in his essay ‘On Imitation’ is an important means of understanding Keats’s beauty/truth dialectic in Ode on a Grecian Urn and elsewhere: ‘to the genuine artist, truth, nature, beauty, are almost different names for the same thing’ (HW, IV, 75). More often overlooked is the fact that the Essay is a critical response to Enlightenment theories of moral philosophy and human understanding. Hazlitt’s primary argument is that knowledge is produced by the impressions created on our minds either by the memory or the observation of external objects, but that these ‘sensations’ are framed into ideas by the imagination or active powers of the mind (HW, I, 38–9). This argument draws on Locke’s rejection of innatism in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and the related theory that ideas arise from external material which elicits first a sensation and then a reflection. Locke, Hume, Hartley and others claimed that the mind could build complex ideas out of simple sense perceptions through the principle of association, but that ‘new’ thoughts were really only new simple ideas or combinations of simple ideas or parts of more complex ones.11 These theories saw the human mind as a mechanism and tended, albeit to varying degrees, to deny the active ability of the imagination to create, invent or frame entirely new ideas divorced from initial sensory
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experiences. Hazlitt’s Essay directly opposes mechanical theories of understanding, focusing in particular on the ‘doctrine of vibrations’ in Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749), which suggests that the association of ideas is materialised in terms of repeated vibrations and supposes that the order of place and time correspond exactly in all combinations of our ideas (HW, I, 57).12 Hazlitt, on the other hand, argues that there is no regular, local arrangement of ideas that corresponds to the way in which they cohere in the mind. The individual is instead laid open to all impressions at once (HW, I, 60). He goes on to reject Hartley’s idea that mechanical association is the only or primary mode of the operation of the human mind, arguing instead that association is a habitual relation between continuations of the same ideas which act upon one another in a certain manner simply because the original impressions were excited simultaneously (HW, I, 63). Association, for Hazlitt, is therefore only one of the ways in which ideas are recollected. It is ‘a particular and accidental effect of some more general principle, not the sole-moving spring in all combinations which take place between our ideas’ (HW, I, 65). Hazlitt also rejects in his Essay the principle of self-interest described as the primary motivating factor for human action in licentious moral systems such as Helvétius’s De l’Esprit (1758), which argues that human actions and judgements are generated by the natural desire to maximise pleasure and minimise pain. Hazlitt instead sees the human mind as naturally ‘disinterested’ and the imagination is at the heart of his theory (HW, I, 6, 12): ‘The imagination, by means of which alone I can anticipate future objects, or be interested in them, must carry me out of myself into the feelings of others by one and the same process by which I am thrown forward as it were into my future being, and interested in it’ (1–2).13 The imagination is therefore the ‘immediate spring and guide of action’ that controls all of ‘the blind impulses of associated mechanical feeling’ and makes them ‘subservient to the accomplishment of some particular purpose’ (23). Hazlitt’s idea of the imagination’s ability to project itself ‘into the feelings of others’ is clearly informed by Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, which similarly argues for the central place of sympathetic identification in our actions and moral judgements.14 While Hazlitt’s Essay is primarily a theory of action rather than a theory of judgement, both writers reject the principle of self-love. Smith refutes the ascetic arguments of philosophers such as Mandeville by arguing that society is held together by virtues rather than by interests, or at least that there is not a strict division between ‘self-regarding and other-regarding’ action (Sentiments, pp. 308–14).15 His primary argument is that motive rather than consequence or effect is at the heart of why men approve or disapprove of
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an action. Men are able to understand each other’s motives through sympathy, which allows them to enter vicariously into the situation of another person ‘by changing places in fancy with the sufferer’ (pp. 9–10). It is by and through the imagination that we are able to ‘place ourselves in his situation’: ‘we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations’ (p. 9). Sympathetic identification also allows us to witness our own conduct: ‘The principle by which we naturally either approve or disapprove of our own conduct, seems to be altogether the same with that by which we exercise the like judgments concerning the conduct of other people’ (Sentiments, p. 109). An actor, through the process of the imagination, can divide himself into an agent, participant and judge, and can achieve the perspective of an impartial spectator (p. 110). For Smith, the propensity to sympathise or identify with one’s fellow men is innate rather than taught, and like his mentor Francis Hutcheson, he argues that our moral faculties are founded upon ‘a certain modification of reason, upon an original instinct, called a moral sense, or upon some such principle of our nature’ (p. 165). The moral faculty is therefore a sort of ‘sense’ and our first perceptions of right and wrong are natural, spontaneous and disinterested, even if modified later by reason and prudence. For Hazlitt, human action and moral education are similarly based on the operation of the affections or basic feelings rather than on reason. He conceives of thought as a complex interaction between imagination and memory: ‘This faculty in passing from the recollections of my past impressions to the imagination of my future ones makes the transition almost imperceptible, and gives to the latter an apparent reality and presentness to the imagination’ (HW, I, 42). However, Hazlitt maintains that imagination and memory only move us to action if they play on our ‘affections’ and are ‘sufficiently warm and vivid’ enough to excite the interest of the emotions (I, 12).16 Keats’s letter to Benjamin Bailey of 22 November 1817 reiterates this connection between the affections and the imagination: I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth— whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty— … The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth. (LJK, I, 184–5)
Most commentators have read the ‘Adam’s dream’ passage as referring to a Platonic prefiguration of a higher immanent reality, but it is equally suggestive of Hazlitt’s argument about the revelatory role of the imagin-
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ation (HW, I, 38–9). Here Keats follows Hazlitt in suggesting that it is not only associative thought that explains the processes of perception but also the more active powers of the imagination: what the mind seizes as beauty is truth ‘whether it existed before or not’.17 As Jon Mee has pointed out, Keats’s understanding of the aesthetic and moral power of beauty is similar to Hazlitt’s conception of beauty as the warmth or intensity of the imagination: ‘the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth’ (LJK, I, 192). Keats’s most obvious attempt to establish an aesthetic regime based on Hazlitt’s principles of human understanding is revealed in his letter to John Taylor of 27 February 1818 in which he sets out his ‘Axioms’ of poetry: 1st I think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity—it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance—2nd Its touches of Beauty should never be half way therby making the reader breathless instead of content: the rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should like the Sun come natural natural too him—shine over him and set soberly although in magnificence leaving him in the Luxury of twilight—but it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it—and this leads me on to another axiom. That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all. (LJK, I, 238–9)
The idea of remembrance or recognition points to Hazlitt’s belief in the Essay that the power of the imagination can enable us to see instinctive or intuitive truths. The idea that poetic representation should be natural rather than ‘half way’ is suggestive of his claim that the transition between recollection and the imagination should be ‘almost imperceptible’ (HW, I, 42). As Mee has noted, Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Imitation’ is also key to understanding Keats’s three axioms: ‘Art shows us nature, divested of the medium of our prejudices’ (HW, IV, 74).18 Keats’s idea of ‘fine excess’ coincides with Hazlitt’s idea of the power of emotional intensity and the vividness of impressions, but his emphasis on the importance of ‘naturalness’ and almost unconscious recollection – ‘a wording of his own highest thoughts’ – is more reminiscent of principles relating to associationist psychology than Hazlitt’s stress on the active powers of the mind.19 In his letter to Bailey of 22 November 1817, for example, Keats refers to the mechanical repetition of ideas during the associative process, although, like Hazlitt, he seems to be suggesting that association depends on the ‘old idea lurking in the mind with all its old associations hanging about it’: ‘—have you never by being surprised with an old Melody—in a delicious place—by a delicious voice, fe[l]t over again your very speculations and surmises at the time it first operated on your soul—’ (LJK, I, 185).
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Keats’s departure from Hazlitt’s theory of human understanding is more apparent in his letter to Reynolds of 19 February 1818. Reflecting on his own professional inactivity and sense of idleness on a particularly beautiful winter’s morning, Keats writes to Reynolds playfully to disclaim the worth of book-learning and ‘serious’ reading, advising instead that ‘a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner’: ‘—let him on any certain day read a certain Page of full Poesy or distilled Prose and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it’ (LJK, I, 231). This imaginative freedom and ‘sparing touch of noble Books’, by which he seems to mean speculative works of history and philosophy rather than works of the imagination, is not irreverent to their authors for two reasons that are central to Keats’s developing ideas on the nature of human understanding: first, because the ‘mere passive existence’ of ‘great Works’ is of more benefit than any of the derivative homage ‘paid by Man to Man’ by reading or writing about them; and second, because original and imaginative thought, however indolent in a scholarly sense, is closer to true knowledge than the accumulated wisdom of memory and custom. ‘Memory’, he remarks, ‘should not be called knowledge—Many have original Minds who do not think it—they are led away by Custom’ (LJK, I, 231).20 Although Keats retracts or at least tempers his opinion on ‘serious books’ in a subsequent letter to his brothers – ‘I am reading Voltaire and Gibbon, although I wrote to Reynolds the other day to prove reading of no use’ (LJK, I, 237) – his comment on reading is frequently cited as an example of his naivety and lack of serious scholarly interest. He himself admits, in a typically contrary fashion, to being ‘sensible all this is a mere sophistication, however it may neighbour to any truths, to excuse my own indolence’ (LJK, I, 233), but despite being part of an attempt to amuse Reynolds after a bout of rheumatic fever, his observations on passive understanding and imaginative thinking are far from frivolous, and are not dissimilar to contemporary critiques of the rationalist approach to education which was thought by Wordsworth and others to replace the imagination with ‘a mechanical, regularized, and directly supervised program of moral “improvement”’.21 Keats is, of course, more concerned with education in a wider sense – that is, as an intellectual and moral development towards the ‘“Spirit and pulse of good”’ – but Wordsworth’s attack on rationalist pedagogical models and his influential representation of the spontaneous child in the Immortality Ode and elsewhere nonetheless informs the nature of Keats’s own ‘voyage of conception’: the child’s ‘prattle’ gives ‘wings’ to the ‘ethereal finger-pointings’ occasioned by indolence; and while the more
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informed ‘converse’ of ‘middle age’ provides the necessary strength with which to beat those wings (LJK, I, 231), Keats’s reference to the different states of childhood and adulthood, marked by a division between the winged freedom of prattle and the strength or force of converse, reminds us of the extent to which Wordsworth had by 1818 become his primary literary model. It also gestures towards a subsequent and more critical distinction in the letter between passive and active forms of understanding. Hyder E. Rollins notes that Wordsworth’s sense of ‘wise passiveness’ in Expostulation and Reply was probably in Keats’s mind during his composition of the letter and in particular during his extended metaphor about the flower and the bee, in which he recommends that we ‘open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive’ (LJK, I, 232). The ‘negative’ state of ‘receiving’ is preferable to the more restless and aggressive state of ‘giving’ or ‘seeking’, and these lines famously clarify Keats’s concept of ‘negative capability’ or the ability of the mind to exist in ‘uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’ (LJK, I, 193); in other words, its ability intuitively to comprehend and embrace the mists of ‘half-knowledge’, but also to exist in a negative, neutral or receptive state that is capable of projecting itself into the minds, feelings and characters of others.22 While Keats seems to be arguing against the kind of inductive reasoning usually associated with the British empiricists, his emphasis on a passive or ‘negative’ mode of understanding which eschews methodical models and factual knowledge for imaginative experience both echoes and problematises the educational theories of Locke and Rousseau, whose Of the Conduct of the Understanding (1706) and Émile, or On Education (1762), respectively, he owned. In Émile Rousseau sets out the various stages of Émile’s progressive intellectual development from infancy to adulthood, and adapts Locke’s ideas on the importance of learning through observation rather than through reading and rote-learning: ‘Je hais les livres; ils n’apprennent qu’à parler de ce qu’on ne fait pas.’ Notably, the first and, for a time, the only book that Émile is permitted to read is Robinson Crusoe (1719), one of Keats’s own favourite books as a schoolboy. The rationale behind Rousseau’s choice and restriction of book has more in common with Keats’s own reflections on learning and understanding than it first appears. Rousseau argues that Crusoe’s belated isolation from society demonstrates the means by which man can rise above custom and common prejudices, and the book offers an implicit parallel to Émile’s own utopian and isolated state of nature. Education, for Rousseau, is a process of discovery during which the child is required to gain knowledge by personal experience rather than by memory acquisition.23
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Locke is less radical in his attitude towards education than Rousseau, but in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) he, too, argues that reading, writing and learning, while necessary, are ‘not the chiefest Business’ and are ‘subservient only to greater Qualities’. An educator must instead ‘form the Mind of his Scholars, and give that a right disposition’ or ‘all the other Accomplishments of Education will be to no purpose’. Locke does not, of course, reject books and learning altogether, but in the Conduct he distinguishes reading from thinking and understanding: ‘Reading furnishes the Mind only with Materials of Knowledge, ’tis Thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and ’tis not enough to cram our selves with a great load of Collections.’ He goes on to argue that what we read in books is not always built upon true or proper foundational principles or even correctly deduced from those principles; and, in section 23, he extends this argument in order to claim that genuine discoveries of general truths are made only by ‘Intuition, Demonstration, or probable Deductions’, and that this form of knowledge is ‘most properly the Business of those who pretend to improve their Understandings, and make themselves knowing by Reading’.24 Locke promotes instead the kind of knowledge that is gained by personal and direct experience, using optical metaphors of obscurity and clarity in order to distinguish between the transparency of first-hand experience and the darkness of second-hand knowledge: ‘Knowing is Seeing, and if it be so, it is madness to perswade our selves that we do so by another Man’s Eyes.’ Keats’s repeated use of the word ‘mist’ in his letters to refer to moments of intellectual confusion or obscurity is reminiscent of the scopic drive of Locke’s metaphors in his Conduct and Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke’s arguments in favour of experiential knowledge – ‘He must try whether his Principles be certainly true or not, and how far he may safely rely upon them’ – certainly seem to find expression in Keats’s own idea that ‘axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses: We read fine——things but never feel them to thee full until we have gone the same steps as the Author’ (LJK, I, 279).25 The Conduct is by no means the only or even the principal source of Keats’s sceptical and empirical view of knowledge or of his attitude towards reading and learning, as Hazlitt’s writing on associationism attests, but Keats joins Locke and Rousseau in emphasising intellectual agility and responsiveness over factual knowledge and memory acquisition; and he demonstrates an advanced awareness that knowledge is not primarily defined by book-learning, a priori thinking, custom or revealed religion.26 Moreover, he seems to prioritise passive understanding over intellectualisation. Unlike Hazlitt, Keats describes the characteristics of
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‘Men of Genius’ as more passive than those of ‘Men of Power’ – they ‘have not any individuality, any determined Character’ (LJK, I, 184) – and he seems more willing than Hazlitt to accept the Lockean–Hartleyan idea of the associative processes of the human mind. At the very least, Keats’s intermittent promotion of associative theory over the Scottish commonsense position, his emphasis on a negative education and his reading in pedagogy suggests a Hartleyan concern with the pliability of man and an acknowledgement of the centrality of self-education for human development for which he is not often credited. At the time of his remark about ‘Men of Genius’, Keats was reading Biographia Literaria (1817), in which Coleridge argues that the true genius is one whose ‘feelings have been habitually associated with thoughts and images, to the number, clearness, and vivacity of which the sensation of self is always in an inverse proportion’. Coleridge’s ‘secondary imagination’ which ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify’, is similar to Hazlitt’s understanding of the active operation of the imagination, whereas Keats’s representation of the passivity of the human mind seems closer to the idea of the ‘second consciousness’ associated with sleeping and dreaming, during which state the mind operates without a sense of conscious volition or agency.27 For Keats, the general state of the creative human mind often seems analogous to the state of the mind during sleeping and dreaming, and he expands upon the idea of ‘diligent indolence’ in his famous comparison of the flower and the bee in his letter to Reynolds of 19 February 1818 (LJK, I, 232). However, passivity and receptivity are also crucial to his more general ideas on the processes of perception and human understanding.28 In a letter to Bailey for 23 January 1818, for example, he insists on the benefits of giving oneself up to the circumstances that form the human intelligence: The best of Men have but a portion of good in them—a kind of spiritual yeast in their frames which creates the ferment of existence—by which a Man is propell’d to act and strive and buffet with Circumstance. The sure way Bailey, is first to know a Man’s faults, and then be passive, if after that he insensibly draws you towards him then you have no Power to break the link. (LJK, I, 210)
Keats argues that the reasons and motives for action – the ‘portion of good’ and ‘spiritual yeast’ that propel men to act – are natural and disinterested. Hazlitt, too, maintains that ‘as a voluntary agent’ man must be disinterested, but he rejects the idea of human relations as ‘a sort of hypostatical union between the interests of the being acting, and the being acted upon’ (HW, I, 7, 8) that Keats describes in his letter to Bailey and
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also in his September 1819 letter to the George Keatses: ‘Men who live together have a silent
moulding and influencing power over each other—They interassimulate’ (LJK, II, 208). By March 1819, Keats’s ideas on passivity have permeated his sense of human action and understanding to the extent that not only ‘consequitive reasoning’ but also purposive fixation is to be derogated. Instinct and purpose connect man and beast: ‘The greater part of Men make their way with the same instinctiveness, the same unwandering eye from their purposes, the same animal eagerness as the Hawk’ (LJK, II, 79); and it is this purpose ‘that makes the Amusement of Life—to a speculative Mind. I go among the Feilds and catch a glimpse of a stoat or a fieldmouse peeping out of the withered grass—the creature hath a purpose and its eyes are bright with it—’ (LJK, II, 80).29 But for Keats, both the deliberative man and the peeping fieldmouse have a purpose that defines but does not adequately explain the ‘mystery’ of their existence: ‘I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying along—to what?’ In spite of the ‘instinctive course’ of the ‘veriest human animal’ he nonetheless feels himself to be ‘writing at random—straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness’. It is the extensive sympathy of the human heart that can alone explain ‘the burden of the mystery’: ‘The Creature has a purpose and his eyes are bright with it. But then as Wordsworth says, “we have all one human heart”’ (LJK, II, 80). This reference to The Old Cumberland Beggar reveals the growing importance of Wordsworth’s ‘mild touch of sympathy’ (106) for Keats’s conception of aesthetic creation and for his understanding of human development more generally, an idea that is essential to his representations of the poet-figure in Endymion and Hyperion, but which reaches its apotheosis in the sympathetic psychic projection of The Fall, which seeks to abandon the ‘mammon’ associated with dramatic effect for the unselfish nature of sympathetic identification.
Fanaticism, ‘Soul-making’ and Enlightenment Natural Histories of Religion in The Fall The first stanza of the induction to The Fall distinguishes between ‘fanatics’ and ‘poets’, implicitly contrasting the poet’s reflections with the fanatic’s dreams and the savage’s surmises: ‘Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave / A paradise for a sect; the savage too / From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep / Guesses at heaven’ (I, 1–4). The way to progress from the ‘dumb enchantment’ (I, 11) of these fanciful visions to the more socially responsible visions of the poet is, Keats argues, to trace them ‘upon vellum or wild Indian leaf’ (I, 5), for without a written record
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the dreamer cannot record his visions in a permanent form, and his ‘melodious utterance’ (I, 6) can be of little social value. The difference between the poet and the fanatic is not, therefore, only in the ‘mode of telling’ but also in the mode of transmission: it is ‘the fine spell of words alone’ (I, 9) – in this case, primarily written words and writing – that ‘can save / Imagination from the sable charm’ (I, 9–10).30 Keats clearly associates the first ‘savage’ or primitive stage of poetry with oral culture here, working within a tradition derived from Enlightenment language theory and the conjectural social histories of Smith, Blair and Kames. Peacock, too, follows sociological models when he argues in his Four Ages of Poetry that the first stage of poetry was ‘before the invention of written letters’: ‘The savage indeed lisps in numbers, and all rude and uncivilized people express themselves in the manner which we call poetical.’ Like Keats, he suggests that the early poets expressed fantasies rather than truths: ‘Poets are as yet the only historians and chroniclers of their time, and the sole depositories of all the knowledge of their age; and though this knowledge is rather a crude congeries of traditional phantasies than a collection of useful truths, yet, such as it is, they have it to themselves.’ Peacock goes on to argue that genuine ‘[p]oetry cannot travel out of the regions of its birth’, which he associates with ‘the uncultivated lands of semi-civilized men’, parodying the Scottish Enlightenment four stages theory by presenting four successive stages of literary progress and decline. His primary argument is that ‘as the sciences of morals and of mind advance towards perfection … as reason gains the ascendancy in them over imagination and feeling, poetry can no longer accompany them in their progress, but drops into the background, and leaves them to advance alone’. While the historian and the philosopher advance the progress of knowledge, the inspirations of poetry can ‘never make a philosopher, nor a statesman, nor in any class of life an useful or rational man. It cannot claim the slightest share in any one of the comforts and utilities of life of which we have witnessed so many and so rapid advances.’ He even rejects ethical poetry as ‘consisting merely of querulous, egotistical rhapsodies’.31 Keats, however, refutes the popular argument that the poetic imagination is best identified with the imaginative and fantastical vitality of oral and primitive cultures rather than with the analytical and codified thought of more refined ones. Terence Hoagwood has noted the way in which the opening of the poem draws on alternative understandings of writing and codification in works such as Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795), which attributes mankind’s evolution to the third epoch of the human mind to ‘the invention of Alphabet Writing’. Condorcet argues that, slow as progress is in this epoch,
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‘auroient été impossibles, si ces mêmes hommes n’avoient connu l’art de l’écriture, seul moyen d’assurer les traditions, de les fixer, de communiquer et de transmettre les connoissances, dès qu’elles commencent à se multiplier.’ 32 Writing is, therefore, the only way in which traditions can be rendered secure and permanent, and knowledge can increase and be communicated to posterity. Smith argues much the same thing in his Lectures on Jurisprudence, stating that ‘in barbarous nations where literature is little cultivated and wisdom can only be got by experience, age is much more respected than when letters, conversation, and other artificiall methods of acquiring knowledge are introduced’.33 Hoagwood is primarily concerned with the way in which writing becomes a form of ‘image-substitution’ or figurality in The Fall, but his analysis is suggestive of my argument that the induction can be read as a hypothetical history of the progress of mankind from oral to written culture as well as from primitive and selfish superstition to deistic and sympathetic understanding, albeit one which is ultimately unsure of its own status: ‘Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse / Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known / When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave’ (I, 16–18).34 Eighteenth-century anthropologists often linked superstition and fanaticism with the earlier stages of society, and Keats has Enlightenment natural histories of religion in mind when he associates the false poet or dreamer with savagery and fanaticism. Sceptics and deists like Hume and Voltaire saw the history of religion as a development from crude ideas about God based on fear, superstition and fanaticism to a more rational and cultivated understanding of the spiritual world. In The Natural History of Religion, Hume presents a naturalistic rather than a Christian account of the religious impulse, arguing, like Boulanger in L’Antiquité dévoilée par ses usages (1766), that religion had its origins in fear and ignorance, and that primitive people were polytheistic. Mankind manages to progress from polytheism to monotheism, but the latter breeds enthusiasm and fanaticism, both of which have a negative impact on a society’s degree of refinement.35 Although his scepticism did not extend as far as Hume’s dismissal of ancient monotheism, in chapter five of La Philosophie, ‘De la religion des premieres hommes’, Voltaire similarly argues that primitive man had a primitive religion which originated in the need for the community to understand the revolutions of the physical world, and that an understanding of a ‘dieu, formateur, rémunérateur et vengeur’ was ‘le fruit de la raison cultivée’ (Essai, I, 13). There were many theories about the origins of religion in circulation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from Jaucaourt’s belief that an original monotheism had degenerated into pantheism, polytheism and superstition to Diderot’s argument that religion had developed from
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pantheism to polytheism and then monotheism.36 Condorcet saw the origin of almost all religions as star worship: priests named constellations and planets to explain their appearances but ‘leur langage, leurs monumens, en exprimant pour eux ces opinions métaphysiques, ces vérités naturelles, offroient aux yeux du peuple le systême de la plus extravagante mythologie, devenoient pour lui le fondement des croyances les plus absurdes, des cultes les plus insensés, des pratiques les plus honteuses ou les plus barbares’.37 I have already outlined in Chapter 3 the extent to which superstition and fanaticism haunt Voltaire’s and Robertson’s ambiguous depiction of human progress in the Essai sur les mœurs and The History of America. The crusades, the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre and the Spanish atrocities in America are, for Voltaire, only the most notable examples of mankind’s recurrent relapses into primitive savagery and barbarism; and Robertson, too, is appalled by the barbarity and fanaticism of the supposedly civilised Spaniards as they hunt for gold and religious conversions. In the Stuart and Tudor volumes of The History of England, Hume more explicitly associates fanaticism with uncultivated thought processes, relating degrees of religious fanaticism to different stages of social development throughout the country.38 The fanaticism in Scotland, for example, is the result of a lower level of social development than that of England: ‘The same horror against popery, with which the English puritans were possessed, was observable among the populace in Scotland; and among these, as being more uncultivated and uncivilized, seemed rather to be inflamed into a higher degree of ferocity’ (History of England, VI, 323). The turbulent Highlanders, who are described as ‘the people the most disorderly and the least civilized’ in the country (V, 397), are more fanatical again (VII, 422–4; VIII, 58); and in The History of Scotland, Robertson similarly presents the Scots, and in particular the Highlanders, as inferior to the English and French level of development (I, 110), arguing that the superstition of popery was more extravagant in those countries situated in the periphery of Europe and that ‘the form of Popery, which prevailed in Scotland’ was therefore ‘of the most bigotted and illiberal kind’ (History of Scotland, I, 120). Britain’s Irish subjects are in a yet worse state, being ‘a people whose customs and manners approached nearer those of savages than of barbarians’ (History of England, V, 397), and they are even unable to participate in the general enlightenment of the Reformation (V, 397–8). The Popish Plot, on the other hand, while the result of prejudice and ‘universal panic’, is presented as an otherwise ‘altogether inexplicable’ anomaly in the history of the more cultivated English (VIII, 63).
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As we have seen in Chapter 2, for Smith moral education is similarly historically conditioned.39 In The Theory of Moral Sentiments he argues that morality is to a large extent limited to leisure societies: ‘Before we can feel much for others, we must in some measure be at ease ourselves. If our own misery pinches us very severely, we have no leisure to attend to that of our neighbour.’ As for the savage, ‘[h]is circumstances not only habituate him to every sort of distress, but teach him to give way to none of the passions which that distress is apt to excite. He can expect from his countrymen no sympathy or indulgence for such weakness’ (p. 205). In civilised nations, on the other hand, ‘the virtues which are founded upon humanity, are more cultivated than those which are founded upon selfdenial and the command of the passions’ (pp. 204–5). ‘Hardiness’ is therefore ‘the character most suitable to the circumstances of a savage; sensibility to those of one who lives in a very civilized society’ (p. 209; see also p. 153). Smith seems to be admitting a connection here between the idea of moral progress and changes in society, and he, in essence, historicises Hutcheson’s idea of the ‘moral sense’ by presenting ‘conscienceformation as a phenomenon distinctive of civilized society’.40 As John Darnford has pointed out, for Smith, ‘historical progress has been a story not only of the spread of general opulence, but also of a gradual transformation in the prevailing moral texture of societies’.41 The poet’s ability to sympathise with an ancient culture and civilisation in The Fall is similarly presented as possible only from a more advanced cultural and historical position than that of the savage and fanatic. To put this argument another way, the humanity of Keats’s poet is universal but not historically transcendent; and his ability to sympathise with the Titans is the product of cultural and historical refinement. In abandoning the original Hyperion and recasting it as The Fall, Keats is not simply replacing an objective mode of literary representation with a subjective one, but also situating individual moral, spiritual and creative development in sociological terms: the dreamer must pass the developmental stage for which the fanatic and the savage are representative figures and ascend to the more advanced level of human understanding represented by the true poet. The dreamer’s fault or original sin is one of ignorance, self-delusion and self-love; and he is therefore initially unable to sympathise with the suffering and concerns of others. The descriptive dream-landscape of the poem’s opening is an appropriately luxurious setting for his overwhelming self-absorption: the bower of ‘Palm, myrtle, oak, and sycamore, and beech’ (I, 20) which greet him and the summer fruits on which he feasts to excess are suggestive of his life of licentious and unthinking pleasure. However, the feast and edenic paradise are only the surface or illusory
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manifestations of his self-deception. That the flowery bower is quickly replaced by a cold and forbidding chamber, and the food and drink by a poisonous potion, is unsurprising as these transmogrifications are merely the first step in the dreamer’s recognition of his painful duty towards others. In particular, the Titans’ mode of consciousness before their fall, while representing the ‘infant chamber’ of human development, is required to be understood and appropriated by those who wish to progress to the next stage of human understanding. As many commentators have pointed out, it is therefore important that the dreamer is in the primeval and long-forgotten Temple of Saturn – ‘So old the place was, I remembered none / The like upon the earth’ (I, 65–6) – which is vast, deserted and vacant: ‘once more I rais’d / My eyes to fathom the space every way; / The embossed roof, the silent massy range / Of columns north and south, ending in mist / Of nothing’ (I, 81–5). On one level, these lines are suggestive of the paralysis and ‘exhaustion of the Miltonic place’, but the significance of the chamber’s vacancy extends well beyond Keats’s response to his literary heritage. Nor is the silence and spatial vastness of the temple simply representative of universal suffering, as some critics have suggested.42 The temple also represents the empty ethical space that the poet must fill or animate through a rejection of his own selfish desires. Its extreme emptiness and vastness are suggestive of the new proportional scale required for him to distance his immediate distresses and selfish passions in order to identify with the greater concerns of others. As a dreamer, he is unable to sympathise with the Titans and cannot find words capable of encapsulating Moneta’s tale of loss: ‘I had no words to answer; for my tongue, / Useless, could find about its roofed home / No syllable of a fit majesty / To make rejoinder to Moneta’s mourn’ (I, 228– 31). Similarly, Moneta’s face initially reveals little or nothing to him. Her unveiling is comparable to Apollo’s encounter with Mnemosyne in Hyperion, but whereas Apollo sees a vision of ‘Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, / Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, / Creations and destroyings’ (Hyperion, III, 114–16), Moneta’s face is ‘blank’: Half closed, and visionless entire they seem’d Of all external things—they saw me not, But in blank splendor beam’d like the mild moon, Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not What eyes are upward cast. (I, 267–71)
Greg Kucich has argued that Moneta’s face represents a resistance to fixed structures of understanding, and certainly the poem is about change: ‘not
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a specific example of change … and not merely the concept of change … but rather the process of historical change itself’.43 However, his argument fails to acknowledge that Moneta’s face is also instructive, comforting even ‘those she sees not’, an idea that supports the alternative line of argument that ‘Moneta preserves the remnants and the memory of the overthrown god’s reign, and schools the visionary poet in lessons (insofar as poetry is a social act) of social responsibility’. Kenneth Muir, for example, has labelled Moneta ‘the priestess of Truth, who had outlived the various manifestations of truth in different ages of the world’; and Walter Evert has similarly argued that she is the ‘bringer of truth through conscience, or through sympathy with the suffering which is as old as the world’.44 It is Moneta who advises the dreamer to ‘Think of the earth’ (I, 169) or, in other words, the suffering of living human beings. As Ryan has pointed out, she represents the irrelevance of received religious doctrine and dogma, and is therefore the teacher of truth through suffering and direct sympathetic understanding rather than through abstract reason and doctrinal principals.45 However, her blankness, like the corresponding vacancy of her temple, also suggests another reading: in her visionless but reflective objectivity she holds up a mirror not to ‘external things’ (I, 268), but to the dreamer’s own conduct and represents something close to Smith’s impartial spectator or conscience. Smith argues that we cannot form any judgement about our own sentiments and motives unless we endeavour to view them from a certain distance from ourselves. In order to do this we must view them ‘as other people are likely to view them’ (Sentiments, p. 110). We therefore ‘suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behaviour, and endeavour to imagine what effect it would, in this light, produce upon us. This is the only looking-glass by which we can, in some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct’ (p. 112). As a reflection or literalisation of the poet’s ‘voice inside’, it is Moneta who is able to show the dreamer the truth about his own conduct and correct his orientation towards self-love by teaching him to project himself into the situation of the suffering Titans. That Moneta is a woman ‘[o]f accent feminine, so courteous’ is significant (I, 215). For Smith, there are two sets of virtues: ‘[t]he soft, the gentle, the amiable virtues, the virtues of candid condescension and indulgent humanity’ and ‘the great, the awful and respectable, the virtues of selfdenial, of self-government, of that command of the passions which subjects all the movements of our nature to what our own dignity and honour, and the propriety of our own conduct require’ (p. 23; see also p. 25). The virtues of humanity and empathy are largely feminine ones and compete with the more masculine qualities of firmness, prudence and
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self-interest: ‘Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity of a man. The fair-sex, who have commonly much more tenderness than ours, have seldom so much generosity … the most human actions require no selfdenial, no self-command, no great exertion of the sense of propriety’ (pp. 190–1). Keats, too, often genders sympathetic identification and negative capability in female terms, as his letter on the flower and the bee suggests (LJK, I, 232). Moneta is, therefore, only a more literal representation of the qualities of humanity, passivity, suffering and sympathy that he frequently attributes to the female sex.46 The dialogue between the dreamer and Moneta, which takes the form of a lesson, may have been suggested to Keats by the formal structure of Voleny’s Ruins in which a pilgrim similarly contemplates the vast scale of ancient temples and tombs in Egypt and Syria before falling into a ‘profound reverie’ (p. 5). His visitation by an apparition or ‘Genius’ occasions a series of dialogues in which he is taught the history and origins of society as well as the lessons of various revolutions. There is a magical or mystical element to their encounter – ‘Immediately he touched my eyes, and they became more piercing than those of the eagle’ (p. 28) – but the Genius’s lesson is ultimately one of moral perspective as the pilgrim gradually learns to identify with events external to himself. Similarly, at the dreamer’s request, Moneta produces a vision of the Titans’ overthrow, and the original poem is combined with the dreamer’s responses either to Moneta or to the visions of the Titans. The dreamer is initially only able to extend his sympathy through the inadequate form of observation: ‘A long awful time / I look’d upon them; still they were the same’ (I, 384–5). But for all of the poem’s figurality, he is not merely the spectator of an aestheticised version of reality. Like Apollo in Hyperion he must sacrifice himself and risk ‘self-loss’ in his direct sympathetic identification with the Titans: 47 —when suddenly a palsied chill Struck from the paved level up my limbs, And was ascending quick to put cold grasp Upon those streams that pulse beside the throat: I shriek’d; and the sharp anguish of my shriek Stung my own ears—I strove hard to escape The numbness; strove to gain the lowest step. Slow, heavy, deadly was my pace: the cold Grew stifling, suffocating, at the heart; (I, 122–30)
As the sensory overload of this passage intimates, the potion of selfawareness progressively numbs, suffocates and stifles the dreamer until it reaches his central and most vital organ: the heart. In spite of his newfound self-awareness, he finds the vision of the Titans and the quest
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for sympathetic understanding mentally and physically overwhelming: ‘Oftentimes I pray’d / Intense, that death would take me from the vale / And all its burthens. Gasping with despair / Of change, hour after hour I curs’d myself’ (I, 396–9). The dreamer thus feels the effects (and affects) of the vision ‘at the heart’. History and, by extension, its representation in art therefore ‘signif[y] only in so far as the self-conscious poet can be made to feel it on his imaginative pulses’.48 The dreamer’s development in The Fall could even be said to take the form of a salvific narrative of sorts, albeit a deistic one which privileges the dictates of the heart over the Christian God: the poet develops from a primitive storyteller who espouses the poetry of ‘dumb enchantment’ and primitive superstition – ‘“Art thou not of the dreamer tribe? / The poet and the dreamer are distinct”’ (I, 198–9) – to a true poet who recognises the importance of the human heart, sorrow and suffering.49 In the poem’s version of the salvific narrative, the poet is the sacrifice and saviour of humanity, and the lesson that he receives from Moneta corresponds in many ways to the sentiments expressed in Keats’s ‘vale of Soul-making’ letter, which he wrote at the end of April 1819, only a little over a month before beginning work on The Fall. Keats argues in his letter that we enter the world as pure ‘Intelligence’, but that we only gain a ‘Soul’ or ‘sense of Identity’ through the lessons provided by ‘Circumstances’; in other words, we acquire an identity through experience and this process is what is meant by the term soul. He also demonstrates his increasing awareness of the importance of human suffering for historical, aesthetic and personal improvement: ‘Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?’ (LJK, II, 102). Keats was unable to accept the doctrine of atonement and so the question of how to account for the suffering in the world remained a major concern for him.50 His view on atonement was influenced by Hunt who, in an Examiner article that Keats called a ‘Battering Ram against Christianity’, compares the human sacrifices of a sect known as the Petzelians to the principles behind the doctrine of atonement (6 September 1818, p. 562; LJK, I, 137). Hunt takes the opportunity to attack bigotry and religious dogma here, but he also connects the re-emergence of fanaticism and other ‘half-witted and savage principles’ with the imposition of the ‘old establishments’ following the fall of Napoleon (p. 561). In his comparison of man and beast in his journal letter of February– May 1819, Keats paints a similarly pessimistic picture of the human condition (LJK, II, 101), suggesting that suffering, savagery and barbarism are recurrent and inevitable. Like Hunt, he rejects the Christian response to this situation: ‘The common cognomen of this world among the
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misguided and superstitious is “a vale of tears” from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven—What a little circumscribe[d] straightened notion!’ (LJK, II, 101–2). Ryan has demonstrated that the ‘misguided’ in this passage are Christians, pointing out that the phrase ‘vale of tears’ has a long history in Christian writing and that ‘interposition’ was a word frequently used to describe the redemptive mission of Christ. Keats is therefore rejecting a Calvinist interpretation of redemption in which man is powerless to influence his salvation.51 His own, alternative system of redemption recognises the importance of the ‘medium of the Heart’ for the development of the soul and places the heart, by which he seems to mean sorrow and suffering, at the centre of salvation: ‘Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, It is the Minds Bible, it is the Minds experience, it is the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity’ (LJK, II, 103). Keats argues here that the heart is the best source of knowledge concerning God’s purpose, a position that was again influenced by Hunt (who later published The Religion of the Heart (1853)) and also by Voltaire and Volney, both of whom argue against heavenly inspiration as the origin of religion and put forward a deistic argument based on the pure religion of nature. All religions are originally ‘recitals of astronomical facts, figurative and emblemmatical narratives of the motion and influence of the heavenly bodies’ (Ruins, p. 225). ‘Such’, Volney declares, ‘O Indians, Budsoists, Christians, Mussulmans, was the origin of all your ideas of the spirituality of the soul! Such was the source of the reveries of Pythagoras and Plato, your institutors, who were themselves but the echoes of another’ (p. 275). Like Volney and Voltaire, Keats maintains that there is nothing unique about the Christian religion: It is pretty generally suspected that the chr[i]stian scheme has been coppied from the ancient persian and greek Philosophers … Seriously I think it probable that this System of Soul-making—may have been the Parent of all the more palpable and personal Schemes of Redemption, among the Zoroastrians the Christians and the Hindoos. For as one part of the human species must have their carved Jupiter; so another part must have the palpable and named Mediator and saviour, their Christ their Oromanes and their Vishnu— (LJK, II, 103)
Here, as in Endymion, he uses comparative theories of religion as the basis for his attack on Christianity, arguing that the elements most fundamental to the Christian religion are borrowed from earlier religions: ‘He cannot embrace it because he sees it as derivative – partly from earlier religions and partly from the needs of its adherents – and therefore a half-truth.’ 52 As his comments on perfectibility also suggest, like many Enlightenment deists Keats does not associate the advancement of religion with either
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a doctrine of progressive revelation or a doctrine of social refinement, and he does not therefore promote the eighteenth-century eschatological tradition or the millennianism borrowed by contemporaries such as Godwin and Owen, and to a lesser extent Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, from Priestley and Price. The ‘big Hearts’ of the Titans in Hyperion identifies them – the sufferers and victims of the historical process – with the ‘medium of the Heart’ or Hornbook that will teach the child to read in Keats’s conception of ‘Soulmaking’: ‘I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read—I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School—and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook’ (LJK, II, 102). It is for this reason that Hyperion is represented within The Fall as a kind of image or simulacrum. The Fall is ‘a fictitious enactment of an event, and not the event itself’ because it is the moral response to sorrow rather than the dramatic tale of sorrow that is at the heart of the poem’s message. The representation of the Titans’ suffering in The Fall emphasises not merely the existence but also the importance of experiencing suffering for historical and personal advancement, just as the ‘vale of Soul-making’ system of salvation ‘involves salvation through adversity rather than from it’.53 The sculptural and statutory nature of the Titans’ characterisation is therefore heightened – ‘Long, long, these two were postured motionless, / Like sculpture builded up upon the grave / Of their own power’ (I, 382–3) – as the whole of Hyperion becomes, in effect, an extended tableau vivant.54 Through the eyes of the suffering dreamer, the poem presents an increasingly humanised view of the history of the gods: ‘“Mortal, that thou may’st understand aright, / I humanize my sayings to thine ear, / Making comparisons of earthly things”’ (II, 1–3). Moneta’s phrase, while literally referring to the idea of translation, virtually encapsulates the meaning of the poem: not only is the Titans’ tale of loss humanised in the sense that it is approached from a perspective that is grounded more firmly in subjective sympathy and compassion, but it is also explicitly human in its reference points.55 There are, as other commentators have pointed out, substantial differences between the two versions of Saturn’s speech to Thea in book one of Hyperion. In The Fall, the speech is no longer addressed to Thea but to all the Titans – ‘“Moan, brethren, moan”’ (I, 412) – suggesting the universal nature of Saturn’s tale of loss. Moreover, the reference to progress in Hyperion – ‘“it must—it must / Be of ripe progress”’ (I, 124–5) – is omitted in The Fall, as is Saturn’s rhetoric of command. The Fall is in general far less committed than Hyperion to a causal explanation of the events that have taken place. Oceanus’s entire speech
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on cultural evolution and natural law is removed; and Saturn is now like ‘some old man of the earth / Bewailing earthly loss’ (I, 440–1): ‘“Weak as the reed—weak—feeble as my voice— / O, O, the pain, the pain of feebleness”’ (I, 428–9).56 Similarly, Thea is ‘in her sorrow nearer woman’s tears’ (I, 338) than the infant goddess of Hyperion. The emphasis of the poem is increasingly on the human and universal elements of the Titans’ suffering and Saturn in particular ‘is humanized, because in the plan of the poem his sorrows are a reflection of the sorrows of humanity.’ 57 On the one hand, the augmentation of the Titans’ sculptural quality would seem to support Hazlitt’s argument in ‘On Poetry in General’ that by their beauty Greek statues ‘are raised above the frailties of passion or suffering’ and are therefore ‘a reproach to common humanity’ (HW, V, 10–11), but on the other, the simultaneous rendering of the Titans as at once more human and more distant or self-sufficient is suggestive of the poem’s concern with the moral rather than dramatic aspects of representation in art. The Fall thereby moves beyond the rhetoric of tragic suffering in the sense implied by the term ‘sentimental history’ so that sorrow and suffering become not only the dominant tropes of the poem, but also its central themes.
Poetic Utility and Shelley’s Defence of Poetry The sociological framework of The Fall suggests that the development of the poet-figure reflects the general evolution of society from primitive barbarism, superstition and fanaticism towards the more civilised virtues of humanitarianism and sympathetic identification. Shelley’s argument in favour of poetry in his Defence, perhaps in reaction to Peacock’s stadial framework in The Four Ages of Poetry, is similarly couched in historiographical and sociological terms: ‘the savage is to ages what the child is to years’ (p. 24). Although Shelley dismisses ‘those more general considerations which might involve an inquiry into the principles of society itself’ in order to consider ‘the manner in which the imagination is expressed upon its forms’ (p. 25), the history of manners and the history of wars and revolutions nonetheless inform his analysis throughout (pp. 34–49). As Chandler has pointed out in relation to passages from A Philosophical View of Reform (1819–20) which were later incorporated into the Defence, Shelley essentially refutes Peacock’s arguments by presenting the connection between ‘poetic vitality and political progress’, thereby ‘working out of the historicist framework of the Scottish Enlightenment rather than that of German Idealism’.58 Shelley begins by drawing on Enlightenment language theory, arguing
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that in the infancy of society every writer is a poet because of the metaphorical nature of primitive language. His initial argument about the origin of poetry is, however, quickly incorporated into a more complex theory of moral philosophy: the poet is one who is most closely able to approximate ‘the beautiful’, and Shelley equates both ‘the true and the beautiful’ to the ‘good’ that exists in the relation between existence and perception, and perception and expression (pp. 25–6). The poet’s capacity to approximate the natural order of the beautiful is therefore the same thing as his ability to approximate truth and good, an idea that is very close to Keats’s own versions of the beauty/truth dialetic as well as to Hutcheson’s benevolent theory of moral philosophy, which defines our sense of good as analogous to our sense of beauty. The primary objective of Shelley’s Defence is to explain poetry’s positive moral and ethical effects, and to subsume the utility of science within the greater utility of poetry: ‘The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life’ (p. 33). Most debates on this passage have centred on whether or not its argument is a direct refutation of Plato, but it also explicitly draws on the language of virtue and Enlightenment moral philosophy.59 Although Shelley argues that poetry should not formulate ethics by writing didactic verse but act ‘in another and diviner manner’ (p. 33), he is deeply concerned with its ethical consequences and famously endorses an expansive definition, claiming that poets are ‘the institutors of laws and the founders of civil society’, ‘legislators or prophets’ (pp. 26–7).60 Shelley’s definition, in effect, amounts to an attempt to define poetry and the poet in moral and ethical rather than aesthetic terms; that is, as one who seeks or ‘acts to produce the moral improvement of man’ rather than who is one concerned only with the arrangement of language or dramatic effect. Like Smith, he defines moral judgement as a process of sympathetic identification or ‘a going out of our own nature’: The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. (Defence, p. 33)
Shelley adapts the Smithean idea of the ‘like situation’ whereby a man must project himself into circumstances not his own or ‘put himself in the
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place of another’; and he emphasises the importance of the imagination in achieving this function: ‘Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man [the imagination] in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb’ (ibid.). The affinities between Shelley’s Defence and Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments also extend to their treatment of utility. Neither writer explicitly or wholly rejects utility, but both argue that it does not attend to ‘first principles’ and that it has been too narrowly defined. For Smith, motive is central to the reason why men approve or disapprove of actions.61 Moral conduct is not based on social good, public welfare or the rational principles of utility, but on the intuitive nature of sympathy and admiration: … upon this foundation [admiration, wonder and surprise] is grounded the greater part of the praise which is bestowed upon what are called the intellectual virtues … The utility of those qualities, it may be thought, is what first recommends them to us; and, no doubt, the consideration of this, when we come to attend to it, gives them a new value. Originally, however, we approve of another man’s judgment, not as something useful, but as right, as accurate, as agreeable to truth and reality: and it is evident we attribute those qualities to it for no other reason but because we find that it agrees with our own. (Sentiments, p. 20)
As Herbert Thomson has pointed out, a large part of The Theory of Moral Sentiments is an attack on those who claim that utility is the primary motivation for ethical judgement.62 Although utility is important and can bestow an additional value on judgements, shared approval or disapproval is the original motive for reward or punishment. Smith extends his discussion to the relationship between beauty and utility: ‘That utility is one of the principal sources of beauty has been observed by every body, who has considered with any attention what constitutes the nature of beauty’ (Sentiments, p. 179). He goes on to claim that ‘[t]he same principle, the same love of system, the same regard to the beauty of order, of art and contrivance, frequently serves to recommend those institutions, which tend to promote the public welfare’ (p. 185). We can thus be charmed by the beauty of utility, and this pleasure ‘plays a major part in sustaining economic activity and political planning’ (p. 14), but there is a greater source of pleasure at hand: ‘What institution of government could tend so much to promote the happiness of mankind as the general prevalence of wisdom and virtue? All government is but an imperfect remedy for the deficiency of these. Whatever beauty, therefore, can belong to civil government upon account of its utility, must in a far superior degree belong to these’ (p. 187). Wisdom and virtue are far more primary considerations than utility,
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and Smith rejects the idea that those institutions or disciplines which directly and obviously promote the public welfare are the only measure of value: It is in the abstruser sciences, particularly in the higher parts of mathematics, that the greatest and most admired exertions of human reason have been displayed. But the utility of those sciences, either to the individual or to the public, is not very obvious, and to prove it, requires a discussion which is not always very easily comprehended. It was not, therefore, their utility which first recommended them to the public admiration. This quality was but little insisted upon, till it became necessary to make some reply to the reproaches of those, who, having themselves no taste for such sublime discoveries, endeavoured to depreciate them as useless. (Sentiments, p. 189)
Smith denies that utility is the main object of scientific inquiry, arguing for the ‘subordination of utility to the intellectual or aesthetic sentiments of wonder, surprise, and admiration’.63 Utility is, therefore, only one among several of the principal sources of beauty and it derives its value from beauty more generally. In preferring aesthetic criteria (or the categories of beauty and taste) to utilitarian ones, Smith follows moral sense philosophers such as Hutcheson, Shaftesbury and Berkeley rather than the more inductive school of scientific empiricism. Shelley’s Defence also considers whether or not the principle of utility can adequately explain the role of art, and Shelley seems to revise his more positive view of utility in A Philosophical View of Reform, dividing the principle of utility into two types: the universal and the permanent (or the higher) and the transitory and particular (or the lower) (Defence, p. 49).64 He accuses those ‘reasoners and mechanists’ who argue that reason is more useful than the exercise of the imagination of having a limited notion of utility, and of banishing ‘the importunity of the wants of our animal nature, the surrounding men with security of life, the dispersing the grosser delusions of superstition, and the conciliating such a degree of mutual forbearance among men as may consist with the motives of personal advantage’ (p. 49). Shelley’s argument in favour of a ‘durable, universal and permanent’ form of utility is similar to Smith’s argument that the value of ‘sublime discoveries’ does not lie in their gross or basic utilitarian function. When Shelley argues that the human mind would never have applied itself to the ‘grosser sciences’ except for the intervention of the ‘inventive and creative faculty itself’ (p. 51), he too is arguing that the creative principle is the basis or foundation of all knowledge, including that of scientific knowledge: ‘The poetry, in these systems of thought [political, historical, scientific and economical], is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes’ (p. 52). Keats’s comments about truth and beauty in his letters and in poems
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such as Ode on a Grecian Urn are seldom read as reflections on the principle of utility, but the idea is implicit to his arguments. As we have seen, throughout his letters, he associates his friend Dilke with ‘consequitive reasoning’, refuting Godwin’s argument that human benevolence is based on rational judgements rather than on the affections. In spite of his intermittent doubts about the value of poetry, Keats essentially rejects rationalist and inductive arguments in his famous comments on truth and beauty, arguing that the two are comparative terms: ‘What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth’; ‘I never can feel certain of any truth but from a clear perception of its Beauty’ (LJK, I, 184; II, 19). Like Shelley, Smith and Hutcheson, he sees the natural and intuitive working of the imagination as revealing of good (or truth), and defends poetry on the grounds of its direct relationship to the imagination (or beauty). In the Defence, Shelley similarly defends poetry on the grounds of beauty, claiming that it is closer to truth than fact or story: ‘A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted’ (p. 31). Chandler has argued that ‘the relation of these two forms of mirroring is itself structured by a mirroring or chiastic trope … and if the poem has beauty on its side, the story has reality to claim for itself’; but this distinction between beauty and reality is exactly what Shelley is trying to avoid. Poetry is indeed ‘a corrective mirror’ and he defines poetry as the ‘imaginative modification of phenomena’, but his point ‘is that the mind’s imaginings are as real as the phenomena’.65 The poet does not so much invent or create a potential order that is not ‘real’ as lift ‘the veil from the hidden beauty of the world’, making ‘familiar objects be as if they were not familiar’ (Defence, p. 33). The Fall is also concerned with the nature of poetic reality. We learn from Moneta that the dreamer is in the temple of Saturn because he is one of ‘“those to whom the miseries of the world / Are misery, and will not let them rest”’ (I, 148–9). He is not, however, as worthy as those nondreamers ‘“Who love their fellows even to the death; / Who feel the giant agony of the world; / And more, like slaves to poor humanity, / Labour for mortal good”’ (I, 156–9). Such men, the goddess argues, ‘are no vision’ries’, ‘no dreamers weak’ (I, 161, 162) and therefore ‘“come not here, they have no thought to come—”’ (I, 165). Jack Stillinger has pointed out that there is a contradiction in the poem’s humanitarian message here: lines 147–81 oppose non-poet humanitarians to poetdreamers, effectively dismissing all poets in a way similar to Keats’s distinction between poetry and philosophy in the previously discussed letter to his brother and sister-in-law of 14 February–3 May 1819: ‘our reasonings … though erroneous … may be fine—This is the very thing in
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which consists poetry; and if so it is not so fine a thing as philosophy’ (LJK, II, 80–1). Lines 189–210, on the other hand, distinguish between poets and dreamers, condemning only dreamers. Stillinger rightly argues that the poem establishes a hierarchy of social usefulness in which the highest calling is the non-poet humanist, followed by the humanist poet and then the dreamer-poet.66 In making this distinction, however, Keats seems to be diluting the force of his argument in favour of poetry’s truthfulness and social relevance. Philip Connell has demonstrated the extent to which the growing influence of Bentham’s utilitarian model of reform ‘provoked the Hunt circle to some uneasy reflections on the “practical”, legislative efficacy of imaginative literature’ between 1815 and 1822.67 Despite his commitment to the idea of a literary intelligensia and a programme of literary as well as legislative reform, Hunt, for example, argues in an article in the Examiner for 22 December 1816 that poets live in ideal but ultimately erroneous world where they ‘either find things delightful or make them so’: They are naturally inventors, creators not of truth but beauty: and while they speak to us from the sacred shrine of their own hearts, while they pour out the pure treasures of thought to the world, they cannot be too much admired and applauded: but when, forgetting their high calling, and becoming tools and puppets in the hands of others, they would pass off the gewgaws of corruption and love-tokens of self-interest, as the gifts of the Muse, they cannot be too much despised and shunned. Poets, it has been said, succeed best in fiction: and they should for the most part stick to it … Their only object is to please their fancy … They easily overlook whatever they do not like, and make an idol of any thing they please. (p. 803)
Hunt’s characterisation of the poet emphasises the fictive qualities of ‘fancy’, ‘invention’ and ‘beauty’; and unlike Shelley’s mirror trope and Keats’s beauty/truth dialectic, his ensuing distinction between the true and the false poet presupposes even in the work of the true poet a disjunction between truth and beauty. This argument is close to Hume’s argument in A Treatise of Human Nature that ideas of the imagination cannot generate real passions or serious beliefs, except in cases of madness; and also of his rejection of the idea that ‘a mere fiction of the imagination’ can have any real effect on the passions (pp. 123, 127). In The Natural History of Religion, he makes the same argument about religious fanatics, suggesting that their doctrines are more affected than real and therefore cannot approach solid belief. For Hume, fiction is almost a form of madness or fanaticism, and therefore cannot be ‘real’ either in substance or in effect.68 Hunt goes on in his article to attack those literary apostates who align themselves with the interests of the establishment for their own gain and recognition, emphasising the insular and selfish motives of Wordsworth’s
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philosophy: ‘He tolerates nothing but what he himself creates: he sympathizes only with what can enter into no competition with him … He sees nothing but himself and his universe … His egotism is in this respect a madness.’ Wordsworth’s poetry and his ‘anti-jacobin politics’ amount to ‘a cant of humanity’, and Hunt describes the ‘false poet’ through the language of insincerity and religious zeal: the idol-mongers ‘overlook what they do not like’ and abandon themselves to the pleasures of their own fancy, while Wordsworth’s egotism is a ‘madness’ akin to fanaticism and religious bigotry (p. 803). When describing the dreamer’s encounter with the goddess Moneta, Keats similarly emphasises his self-referentiality – ‘“Thou art a dreaming thing; / A fever of thyself”’ (I, 168–9) – and thoughtlessness (I, 151). However, in its depiction of the true poet, The Fall challenges the idea that poetry cannot equate to genuine feelings or convictions. Keats’s poet is not merely interested in the delightful; nor is he a fanatic who is concerned only with excessive inward emotion and forgets to think of the earth like Wordsworth’s wanderer in The Excursion (1814). Although Keats prioritises the social productiveness of non-poet humanitarians over that of poet humanitarians, the poem is nonetheless a defence of poetry and the poet along the lines of Shelley’s Defence: ‘like slaves to poor humanity’ (I, 158), the goddess suggests that true poets exist in a state of real imaginative and sympathetic understanding of ‘the giant agony of the world’ (I, 157) and ‘Labour[s] for mortal good’ (I, 159) rather than sympathising ‘only with what can enter into no competition with him’ and tolerating ‘nothing but what he himself creates’. Poetry may be subordinate to the reforming potential of moral and political science, but Keats’s distinction between visionaries and non-visionaries does not ultimately lead him to dismiss the value of visionary experience. He rejects ‘all mock lyrists, large self worshipers, / And careless hectorers in proud bad verse’ (I, 207–8), but ‘sure not all / Those melodies sung into the world’s ear / Are useless’ and the true ‘poet is a sage; / A humanist, physician to all men’ (I, 187–9; 189–90).69 Despite these explicit arguments in favour of poetry’s utility and reality, the poem’s dream framework is nonetheless nearly always read in a negative sense as an evasion of social reality. Hoagwood, for example, has argued that the dream-vision element of The Fall ‘helps to extend the trope of symbol-formation, and suggests that the related problems of fictionality and delusion pertain to (extra-poetic) history’. While there is little doubt that Keats’s sub-titling of The Fall as ‘a Dream’ is the result of his struggle to represent the story of the Titans and Olympians, and Hoagwood is therefore correct in emphasising the importance of fictionality for the poem, Keats is nonetheless attempting to rescue poetry from accusations
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of delusion by arguing that the visionary experience of poetry can be enabling and socially useful.70 When Moneta tells the dreamer to think of the earth, she is warning him not about creative or visionary experience, but about the dangers of illusory and excessive inward feeling. Shelley remarks in the Defence that ‘[p]oetry … differs in this respect from logic, that it is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind, and that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connexion with the consciousness or will’. In making this claim, he too seems to be diluting the argument that poetry is the result of, or can result in, serious beliefs and emotions. However, he goes on to claim that ‘[i]t is presumptuous to determine that these [consciousness, will, and volition] are the necessary conditions of all mental causation when mental effects are experienced insusceptible of being referred to them’ (p. 57). Like Keats, Shelley defends the truth and reality of visionary experience by rejecting the idea that human understanding is grounded only in conscious will and volition. Moral feeling in particular is involuntary and, for both writers, it is the unconscious and visionary nature of poetry that most closely approximates the moral sense. The Fall, therefore, ultimately proclaims the adequacy of visionary experience and the poetic imagination as a vehicle of social reform by refuting the argument that poetry is divorced from truth and reality. In so doing, it establishes Keats as a poet who is able to commit to an ideological platform while simultaneously embracing the qualities of the ‘cameleon’ poet.
Afterword: Ode to Psyche and Ode on a Grecian Urn
The developmental frameworks evident in poems from Sleep and Poetry to The Fall of Hyperion are most often read in relation to theories of influence and maturation. Keats certainly stages his own development as a ‘very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers’ (LJK, I, 214), but both his self-representations and ‘life of allegory’ readings of his work have obscured the extent to which the sociological drive of his poetry is an inheritance from the Enlightenment. His awareness of the ways in which changes in social and economic conditions are reflected in literary practices, as well as his understanding of the interdependence of manners, morals, laws, customs and opinion, suggest that he was writing against the background of his acknowledged reading of Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, Buffon, Robertson, Gibbon, Hutcheson and Mavor, and in all probability, his additional reading of Montesquieu, Goldsmith, Blair, Hume, Hartley, Warton and Smith. Keats draws primarily on six Enlightenment conceptual frameworks: the first is the so-called ‘contrariety’ model that permeates the historiography of the French, English and Scottish Enlightenments; the second is the descriptive developmental model that attempts to explain the shift in European culture from feudal to civil and commercial societies; the third is the so-called ‘philosophic’ model of history which supplements classical and exemplary history with a more empirical study of probable causes and effects, and widens the scope of history from a narrow concern with high politics to a broader view of society; the fourth is the diachronic, comparative and uneven ‘stages of society’ paradigm of the Scottish Enlightenment; the fifth is the Enlightenment moral debate concerning theories of self-interest and benevolence; and the sixth is the associative and sceptical framework of the British empiricists. Keats’s narrative poems in particular are an imaginative rendering and working through of these explanatory models, especially in relation to the idea of ‘history’. Romantic scholars tend to see Enlightenment uniformity
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as an obstacle to a valid or viable form of historicism, and Romanticism is therefore more often aligned with a dialectical Hegelian model of history than it is with sociological or philosophic frameworks; but Keats primarily sees human history as contingent on changes in social and economic conditions, and he tends to represent it as a series of developmental states or stages. In his letters and 1817 Poems he not only depicts history as an abstract narrative of cyclical progress and decline, but also engages in circulating literary-historical debates about the relationship between manners and poetry. His position appears to fundamentally alter in Endymion when he rejects a public history of action for a more private history of feeling. However, his hero’s journey is not divorced from external or social happenings. Endymion not only passes through different terrains and geographies, but also through different states and stages of human development; and his private journey is therefore embedded in a sociological framework as he moves from a state of unreflective and isolated pleasure towards a more socially evolved stage of human development which promotes the social virtue of sympathic identification. The poem also traces the movement from the simple, organic world represented by the ‘Hymn to Pan’ to the more hierarchical world of the Latmian community. The ostensibly joyous pagan society falls quickly into the ‘sad mood’ of feudal oppression, and the static hierarchy from which Endymion feels estranged is itself gradually replaced by a more civilised and humane vision of society dominated by the principles of love and friendship. In The Eve of St. Agnes, Keats similarly depicts feudalism at its point of collapse. History is represented as a lived experience as he evokes the emotional associations of the Middle Ages through his intermittent use of an ‘image’ or ‘associative’ logic, but this emotional evocation of the past nonetheless operates within a larger narrative structure of feudal demise. As in Endymion and Isabella, the apparent order and hierarchy of the feudal world is oppressive and self-interested, and following Robertson, Gibbon, Hume and others, Keats rejects the superstition, tyranny, violence and licentiousness associated with feudalism, portraying the development of the human mind from feudal ignorance to a more humane and sympathetic form of understanding. Several of Keats’s other poems similarly dramatise the consequences of the shift from a simple, unworldly and egalitarian society to a more refined, commercial and artificial one, and trace the subsequent impact of that movement on forms of cultural production. The ‘painful change’ of Madeline’s awakening, Isabella’s ‘hard life’, the ‘wild commotions’ of Apollo’s limbs and the ‘sharp anguish’ of the dreamer all represent the encounter of different sociological ‘types’ or the collision of historical forces in a transitional moment during which the primitive and the refined,
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the ancient and the modern, and the natural and the artificial temporarily and uneasily coexist. In Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion Keats depicts the infant or primitive stage of human society and its replacement by a more refined one, simultaneously portraying both the lost power and vitality of the primitive order as well as the necessity of its downfall. The poems are formally structured around the idea of uneven development: the Titans and the Olympians represent two vastly different stages of evolution, and the selfish dreamer of The Fall is of a tribe ‘distinct’ from the more socially evolved poet. In Hyperion, the contrariety narrative encapsulated in Oceanus’s speech is persuasive enough for a substantial number of critics to ascribe those views to Keats himself, but the poem also introduces into abstract sociological theories of historical change a recognition of the human cost of history. The model of social evolution Keats borrows from the Scottish Enlightenment itself acknowledged that certain kinds of positive social values such as imaginative vitality, bravery and community declined as society developed. Blair’s Critical Dissertation, Ferguson’s Civil Society and even Smith’s Wealth of Nations all see the advance from rudeness to refinement as an ambivalent tale. In relation to the ‘primitivism versus progress’ debate, Keats does not, however, tend to subscribe to the ideal of the noble savage or see the primitive state as an analogue to his own poetic experience, instead seeking a middle ground between a glorification of the primitive and representations of degeneration. Despite his power, Apollo is neither a jubilant conqueror nor an agent of Benthamite utilitarianism; and the argument for the development from dreamer to poet in The Fall is not solely a utilitarian one. In The Fall Keats seems to valorise the codification of more refined societies, but his letters suggest that he increasingly came to doubt the sustainability of progress: ‘But in truth I do not at all believe in this sort of perfectibility—the nature of the world will not admit of it—’ (LJK, II, 101). In Isabella and Lamia, Keats is more critical of the capitalist transformations of traditional society, structuring the poems around pessimistic theories of historical decline from republican models of socio-political health to debates over luxury and commerce. Whereas in Endymion and even Hyperion he presents the way in which simple societies develop into more refined and artificial ones as necessary and inevitable, if not always unambiguously progressive, in Isabella and Lamia the effects of commercial refinement are predominantly negative, resulting in the corruption and decline of once thriving communities. Traditional social values are negated by material social changes (in particular, the pre-eminence of money and the profit motive) and the idealism of both sets of lovers is destroyed by the rational utilitarianism of supposedly civilised societies, although Keats
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also critiques the extremism and isolation of his lovers. The fanaticism with which Isabella tends her pot of basil and the even more determined sectarianism of Apollonius are portrayed as ‘false’ philosophies divorced from the true principles of pleasure and virtue. I have thus far focused on Keats’s narrative poems because they better express the kinds of sociological, anthropological and moral frameworks to which I wish to draw attention, but some of his other poems are nonetheless relevant to the ideas of this book and merit discussion. By very briefly extending my consideration of human understanding and the visionary imagination to Ode to Psyche and Ode on a Grecian Urn, I hope to demonstrate that some of the issues enacted in The Fall and other poems find expression, albeit in a more symbolic way, in Keats’s odes, which are similarly informed by Enlightenment developmental tropes and by empirical, associational and sceptical philosophy. I wish to gesture towards two arguments in relation to Ode to Psyche, which deserve more attention than I can give them here: the first, already raised by James Chandler, is that it can be read as a poem about the human mind’s development from piety and faith to enlightened empiricism and scepticism; the second is that this poem and some of the other odes evince a commitment to empirical and associational theories of the human mind. Drawing on my previous discussions of The Eve and The Fall I wish to show that the idea of reverie – or what some commentators call the ‘visionary imagination’ – is not primarily escapist, but rather has a longer intellectual history in Enlightenment understandings of the mind. As Alan Grob has pointed out, what were in Keats’s time considered ‘metaphysical concepts with a philosophical genealogy’ are now disparagingly referred to as ‘dream’ or ‘vision’.1 Ode to Psyche has traditionally been read as a mapping of the history of poetry whereby the final stanza of the poem ‘illustrates how the “internal” Wordsworthian mode might begin, of historical necessity, to replace more archaic “external” modes of poetic discourse’.2 More recently, Chandler has also read Ode to Psyche as an act of historiography, but rather than seeing its primary meaning as a reference to literary history he defines the developmental movement in the poem as a more public shift from ‘ideology’ to ‘psychology’, arguing that the iterations in the second stanza demonstrate the transformation of understandings of the soul from the ancients to the moderns. The nature of Psyche’s neglect is therefore both ‘the neglect of the pagan-Platonic “Psyche” in favour of the Christian “soul” and the neglect of the Psyche/soul in any form by the mechanist strain in Enlightenment moral philosophy’.3 Although Chandler ultimately reads the ode as a critique of empirical mechanism and scientific rationalism, as does Stillinger who argues ‘that
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it is up to the poet himself to compensate for the cruel banishment of fairies, gods, myth, and religion by Lockean and Newtonian “cold philosophy”’, the narrator clearly associates himself with Psyche’s own empiricism when he states that ‘I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired’ (43).4 Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Hartley tended to present sense perceptions through ocular metaphors and to describe the operations of the mind in terms of visual phenomena. Hartley’s doctrine of vibrations, for example, is heavily derived from Newton’s theory of ‘opticks’; and in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the metaphor of sight is evident in the argument that our ideas can similarly be ‘clear and obscure’.5 The repeated emphasis in the poem on sight and the ambiguities of seeing (5, 6, 9, 12, 43) links both Psyche and the narrator with empirical and scepticial theories of perception, as does Voltaire’s association of Psyche with the ‘sensations’ in Dictionnaire philosophique.6 While the repeated negatives and repetitions in lines 28–35 and 36–49 arguably suggest a regret for the passing both of pagan ‘antique vows’ (36) and ‘the fond believing lyre’ (37) of Christian religious faith, Keats, like Locke and other British empiricists, clearly privileges an empirical knowledge of the self and world derived from his own experience and observation over book-learning, custom, dogma and received religion. The extended ‘garden’ metaphor in the final stanza of the poem, in which the poet proposes to build and tend an imaginary memorial to Psyche in the manner of a landscape gardener cultivating a garden, is particularly suggestive of the empirical basis of Keats’s representation of sense experience. As Grob has pointed out, Keats, at least in this poem, is ‘a basically naïve empirical realist for whom objects apprehended by consciousness in perception are, without further reflection, presumed to be identical with, or at least copies of, objects as they exist in the external world’. Stillinger, too, has admitted that Keats at times demonstrates a naturalising tendency in his work; that is, ‘an idea of imagination that works in and on the real world, and does so within Locke’s and Hartley’s concept of the way the mind functions’. Helen Vendler is, therefore, at least partly correct when she suggests that ‘[t]he notion of art which underlies Keats’s continual use of the trope of reduplication in the [Ode to Psyche] is … a mimetic one’ in which the internal world of the mind is ‘a point for correspondence with the external worlds of history, mythology, and the senses’.7 In contemplating the construction of his ‘fane’ (50), the narrator rejects the conventional physical trappings of worship or commemoration (‘No shrine, no grove, no oracle’ (34)), of which Psyche has in any event long been bereft, and instead addresses her neglect within the imagined landscapes of his own mind, leading Susan Wolfson to argue rightly that the
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narrator of the poem is an active ‘gardener-creator’ as well as a passive ‘spectator-reader’.8 The idea of the gardener-poet was a common one in the eighteenth century. In an essay in The Spectator (No. 417) for 28 June 1712, for example, Joseph Addison uses gardening and poetry as mutual metaphors, arguing that the effect of poetry, like the effect of the garden, depends upon the poet’s ‘cultivation of the imagination’ and the reader’s ‘openness’ to the ‘numberless Ideas’ and ‘images that attend any single circumstance’. For Addison, the experience of the poem is, therefore, a largely involuntary and associative process during which the mind is directed by the customary and habitual connections between mental images and words. In an earlier essay on the English landscape garden in The Tatler (No. 161) for 18–20 April 1710, he casts his vision of the ideal garden in the form of a dream brought about by his reading of The Table of Cebes (1754). The narrator of the paper finds himself in the Alps, and from there views a garden whose great beauty and lack of artifice promotes a rush of associations centred on the Goddess of Liberty and her group of Arts and Sciences, each of which are depicted as statues in an Italian garden, just as Keats represents Love, Ambition and Poesy as marble statues in Ode on Indolence.9 The combination of gardens, poetry and association was evident in a more material way in the work of the eighteenth-century English ‘gardenists’, who often marked their topographical creations with emblematic devices such as urns, statues, inscriptions and classical temples. As Mark Salber Phillips has pointed out, these devices asked the ‘reader’ to connect vistas with moral themes or increasingly, as the century progressed, with expressive emotional states, operating as associational experiments in which topographical and material devices were used to ‘cultivate’ or direct the mind of the spectator.10 Some of Keats’s odes can similarly be read as associative experiments or as responses to material and emblematic devices such as urns, statues, inscriptions and paintings.11 Certainly, the urn and its frieze in Ode on a Grecian Urn direct the terms of the poet’s expressive response: the pipes and timbrels of the first stanza turn the poet’s mind to the unheard melodies of the second, just as the ‘Fair youth, beneath the trees’ (15) suggests the ‘happy, happy boughs’ (21) of the third stanza. The ‘flowery tale’ (4) and ‘leaf-fring’d’ (5) legend that haunts the urn’s shape are suggestive not only of its verbal and plastic decorative embellishments, but also of its more literal location as an urn in a garden. The serene figures in Ode on Indolence, ‘like figures on a marble urn’ (5), can also profitably be read as material objects that form part of a process of reverie or association in a landscape or garden: the narrator is, after all, ‘cool-bedded in the flowery grass’ (52), a line that strongly recalls the ‘calm-breathing’ Psyche and Cupid on the ‘bedded
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grass’ (Psyche, 15), where the ‘two fair creatures’ (9) are likewise presented as a classical statue or tableau: ‘They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass; / Their arms embraced, and their pinions too; / Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu’ (15–17). Numerous critics have pointed out that the relation between the text, the urn and the urn’s content in Ode on a Grecian Urn is discontinuous and fragmentary, and have noted that the text itself is punctuated by gaps, pauses and a long series of qualified negatives. Martin Aske, for example, argues that the urn is an array of image fragments which cannot be organised into a coherent picture, and he therefore reads the poem as an oblique commentary on the poet’s own belated condition. Aske tends to see the odes more generally as a series of ‘floral embellishments to the broken monument of Hyperion’, ‘a parergonal metacommentary on the failure of narrative to re-animate the ancient fictions’.12 However, in the associationist framework in which Keats is writing, one experience or sensation is suggestive not of an ultimate truth but of its relation to another. The partial images of Ode on a Grecian Urn are therefore only partial if they are expected to conform to an idea of truth that is prescriptive or instrumental in its orientation. If, as Hazlitt claimed in his 1822 articles on the Elgin marbles, beauty (as opposed to ‘grandeur’) is defined by the principle of affinity rather than connection, the truth to which the poem aspires in its ‘“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”’ sequence is one which does not demand coherency in the sense that Aske implies (HW, XVIII, 162–6). Thus, while poems such as Ode to Psyche and Ode on a Grecian Urn are concerned with neglect or the failure of commemoration, they are not in themselves failures in reanimation. As Vendler has famously argued, the ‘metonymic substitutions’ in the second stanza of Ode to Psyche point to the compensatory nature of the poet’s fiction. The act of contemplating Psyche’s as yet unrealised memorial – the verbal equivalent of which is the poem itself – becomes, in effect, the memorial, achieved mimetically through a poetry that depends upon associative responses to the vision of Psyche. Similarly, the poet’s contemplation of the commemorative urn in Ode on a Grecian Urn spawns the poem itself. As Jack Jones has noted, the poem clearly shows us ‘the transition from urn to urn-poem’. In this sense, the odes represent the victory of poetic art over plastic expression for, as Hazlitt remarks in his lecture ‘On Poetry in General’, it is ‘in the interval of expectation and suspense, while our hopes and fears are strained to the highest pitch of breathless agony, that the pinch of the interest lies’ (HW, V, 10). The cold self-sufficiency of the urn and the unconsummated nature of the classical statue of Cupid and Psyche are rescued by the poems themselves or, in other words, by the very act of
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written expression. The urn is made to speak by way of the poem and its inscription, but in both cases the object signifies only through words: it is ‘the communicative work of language, with all its associations’ that ‘shows us how art can be “a friend to man”’.13 The odes are commonly read as poems about failure and belatedness: failure to commemorate, failure to reanimate, failure to dispel the harsh reality of the real world. Viewing them as associative responses to material objects is, however, suggestive of the largely successful logic of their formal structure, even if they evince a sceptical inability to deliberate between vision and reality, and a distrust of representations of the noumenal. Keats’s reflections on truth and beauty in his letters, and his repeated emphasis on the revelatory nature of the imagination, point to the influence of Idealist thinkers such as Francis Hutcheson; but in Ode to Psyche he follows empirical theories of perception in implying that sense data are basically copies of objects or ideas that can subsequently be recreated in the mind. This is, of course, the reason why so many of the odes are concerned with the ambiguities of seeing and perceiving, or sleeping and waking. With the disjunction between subject and object comes epistemological crisis and the consequent danger of scepticism: ‘Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see / The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes?’ (5–6). The tendency to condemn the final stanza of Ode to Psyche as an inadequate compensatory mechanism or a ‘mere figure of desire’ based on the pun of ‘fane’ and feign’ is, I think, to miss the point that, for Keats, the mind’s imaginings are as real as any other phenomena.14 Similarly, the common practice of reading the urn as an idealised object is misplaced: the poem’s anti-Idealist aesthetic of association and sensation clearly privileges empirical over ideal qualities. These poems are informed by a complex set of ideas about empirical and associational understanding, and the idea of reverie is as much a part of the intellectual tradition that Keats inherits from the Enlightenment as the sociological and anthropological framework of Hyperion or the benevolism and sympathetic identification of The Fall.
Notes
Introduction 1. Hugh Blair, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (London, 1763), pp. 21, 3. 2. On this point, see Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 7. 3. See, e.g., David Hume, The Natural History of Religion (1757), in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, new edn, 2 vols (1758; London: Longman, Green & Co., 1898), II, 307–63; Marie Jean Caritat, M. de Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de I’esprit humain (Paris, 1795), p. 65; Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 2 vols (London, 1783), I, 115–16; and Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1759), pp. 204–5. 4. James Mackintosh, Review of the poetry of Samuel Rogers (1813), in The Miscellaneous Works of the Rt. Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, ed. Robert J. Mackintosh (London, 1851), pp. 512–14. Sir Walter Scott, ‘Essay on Romance’ (1824), in The Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart, 6 vols (London, 1834), VI, 174–5. 5. See the pioneering work of Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1989); and James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). On Scott and other Scottish writers, see, e.g., Graham McMaster, Scott and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); David Brown, Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979); and Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962). On Scottish national schemes of literature, see the essays in Robert Crawford (ed.), The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), chapter 1, pp. 16–44; and Kenneth Simpson, The Protean Scot: The Crisis of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literature (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988). On English schemes of literature, see Brian Doyle, English and
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6.
7.
8. 9.
10.
11. 12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
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Englishness (London: Routledge, 1990); and John Lucas, English and Englishness: Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry, 1668–1900 (London: Hogarth Press, 1990). For the phrase ‘methodological individualism’, see McMaster, Scott and Society, p. 60. For the idea of the savage as ‘analogue’ to the poet figure, see Maureen N. McLane, Romanticism and the Human Species: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 34. For the alternative argument that it is an injustice to associate the Lake Poets with ‘the cult of the noble savage’, see M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 260, 185. On this point, see Roy Porter, ‘The Enlightenment in England’, in Roy Porter and Mikulàs Teich (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 3. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 10. Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 3. See, e.g., Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. xvii–xviii; and J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 1–34. For a variety of spatial contexts from Mexico to Russia, see Richard Butterwick, Simon Davies and Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa (eds), Peripheries of the Enlightenment (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008). Outram, The Enlightenment, p. 12. See also John Lough, ‘Reflections on Enlightenment and Lumières’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 8 (1985), 1–15. Porter, Enlightenment, p. 7. Norman Hampson, ‘The Enlightenment in France’, in Roy Porter and Mikulàs Teich (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 41. Porter, ‘The Enlightenment in England’, p. 7. On the Counter-Enlightenment, see, e.g., Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Linda Kirk, ‘The Matter of Enlightenment’, The Historical Journal, 43 (2000), 1129. John Robertson, ‘The Enlightenment above National Context: Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Scotland and Naples’, The Historical Journal, 40 (1997), 667–97. Daniel Gordon, ‘Introduction: Postmodernism and the French Enlightenment’, in Daniel Gordon (ed.), Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Descriptions in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 1. For a detailed review of approaches to the Enlightenment, see James Schmidt, ‘What Enlightenment Project?’, Political Theory, 28 (2000), 734–57. See, e.g., Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), and Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). Cf. Gordon, ‘Postmodernism and the French Enlightenment’, p. 2.
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17. David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). Cf. Porter’s discussion of English optimism in ‘The Enlightenment in England’, p. 10. On religion, see Porter, Enlightenment, pp. 96–129; and Spadafora, The Idea of Progress, chapters 3, 6 and 7. 18. William Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 193. 19. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 10. 20. On sentimentalism, see ibid., p. 8; Kirk, ‘The Matter of Enlightenment’, 1137–8; and J. C. Hilson, ‘Hume: The Historian as Man of Feeling’, in J. C. Hilson, M. B. and J. R. Watson (eds), Augustan Worlds: Essays in Honour of A. R. Humphreys (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978), pp. 205–22. David Womersley, The Transformation of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 45. Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740– 1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 7, xi–xiii. 21. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1973). On the non-doctrinaire nature of Enlightenment historiography, see also David Womersley, ‘The Historical Writings of William Robertson’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 47 (1986), 497–506. 22. For a recent challenge to periodicity, see Murray Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 1–3. 23. For these arguments, see ibid., pp. 4–5, 10–11. 24. See, e.g., Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999). 25. Clifford Siskin, ‘The Problem of Periodization: Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Fate of System’, in James Chandler (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 101. Marshall Brown, ‘Enlightenment and Romanticism’, in Stuart Curran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 38. 26. Ibid., p. 42. 27. Siskin, ‘The Problem of Periodization’, p. 115. Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 1. On the historicising trend, see Chandler, England in 1819, p. 4. 28. On the ‘continuum of values’ that determined the writing of the period, see Brown, ‘Enlightenment and Romanticism’, p. 35. 29. Stuart M. Sperry, Jr., ‘Keats’s Skepticism and Voltaire’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 12 (1965), 75. 30. Womersley, Transformation, p. 197. 31. Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism, pp. 10, 4. 32. For a new periodisation emphasising the continuity underlying change, see Siskin’s argument that the period after 1784 constitutes a ‘second Enlightenment’ in ‘The Problem of Periodization’, pp. 114–15. For an example of the view that Keats’s approach is ‘revisionary’, see, e.g., Greg Kucich, ‘Keats’s Literary Tradition and the Politics of Historiographical Invention’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Press, 1995), p. 253. 33. Walter Evert, Aesthetic and Myth in the Poetry of Keats (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 3. 34. Paul de Man, ‘The Negative Road’, in John Keats, Selected Poetry of John Keats, ed. Paul de Man (New York: New American Library, 1966), p. 11. See also Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. vii, 73–4. 35. Ibid., p. 28. Cf. Robert Gittings, John Keats (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 51; and Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet (London: Secker & Warburg, 1963), pp. 18–19. Sperry, ‘Keats’s Skepticism’, 75, 89. See also Stuart M. Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), chapter 1, pp. 3–29. 36. Nicholas Roe, ‘Introduction’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 1. See also Donald Goellnicht, ‘The Politics of Reading and Writing: Periodical Reviews of Keats’s Poems’, in David L. Clarke and Donald C. Goellnicht (eds), New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), pp. 101–31, esp. pp. 101–5. On the nineteenth-century tradition, see Clarence Dewitt Thorpe, The Mind of John Keats (New York: Russell and Russell, 1926), p. 2. On Adonais, see Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Keats Enters History: Autopsy, Adonais, and the Fame of Keats’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 17–45. 37. For New Historicist approaches, see, e.g., Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); and Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). On Keats, see Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), and the essays in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 38. Chandler, England in 1819, p. 3. Paul H. Fry, ‘History, Existence, and “To Autumn”’, Studies in Romanticism, 25 (1986), 217. 39. Chandler, England in 1819, p. 138. 40. Jeffrey Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 84. Cf. P. M. S. Dawson, ‘Poetry in an Age of Revolution’, in Stuart Curran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 49. 41. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections, p. 57. 42. Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (1937; repr. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977), p. 108. Daniel P. Watkins, Keats’s Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1989), pp. 37–8, 43. For a socio-stylistic approach, see Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). 43. Chandler, England in 1819, p. 395. On this point, see ibid., pp. 395–402; and Hugh I. Fausset, Keats: A Study in Development (1922; repr. New York: Archon, 1966). More generally, see Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of
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45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
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Romantic Discourse (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 14. Hermione de Almeida, ‘Introduction’, in Hermione de Almeida (ed.), Critical Essays on John Keats (Boston, MA: GK Hall & Co., 1990), p. 1. Other notable exceptions include Cox, Poetry and Politics; Chandler, England in 1819, pp. 389–480; Fiona Robertson, ‘Keats’s New World: An Emigrant Poetry’, in Michael O’Neill (ed.), Keats: Bicentenary Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 27–48; Roe, Culture of Dissent; Michael O’Neill, ‘“When this warm scribe my hand”: Writing and History in Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 143–64; Greg Kucich, ‘Keats’s Literary Tradition’, pp. 238–61; Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Robert M. Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). Ryan offers his study as a prolegomenon to examinations of Keats’s poetry and, apart from Romantic Medicine and Culture of Dissent, most of the other exceptions are not book-length considerations of Keats’s work. De Almeida, Romantic Medicine, p. 8. For a relatively recent example of this view, see A. D. Nuttall, The Stoic in Love: Selected Essays on Literature and Ideas (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1989), chapter 11, pp. 137–52, esp. p. 145. For examples of the snobbery evident in responses to Keats’s poetry, see Cox, Poetry and Politics, pp. 82–5; Nicholas Roe, ‘Keats’s Lisping Sedition’, Essays in Criticism, 42 (1992), 36–55; Kim Wheatley, ‘The Blackwood’s Attacks on Leigh Hunt’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 47 (1992), 1–31; and William Keach, ‘Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style’, Studies in Romanticism, 25 (1986), 182–96. Even such great Keats scholars as Jack Stillinger, who is at least sympathetic to the idea that Keats was a capable metaphysician, repeatedly revert to the theory that he was fanciful and intellectually unreliable. See The Hoodwinking of Madeline and other Essays on Keats’s Poems (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1971), p. 87 n. 24. See, e.g., Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense, pp. 125–39; and Alan Grob, ‘Noumenal Inferences: Keats as Metaphysician’, in Hermione de Almeida (ed.), Critical Essays on John Keats (Boston, MA: GK Hall & Co., 1990), pp. 292–317. Evert has argued that Keats was a systematic thinker while emphasising only the ‘habitual’, ‘native’ and ‘natural’ tendencies of his intellectual processes, Aesthetic and Myth, pp. 7, 5, 6, 17. For other examples of the same view, see Thorpe, The Mind of John Keats, pp. 3–24; and Sidney Colvin, John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics, and After-Fame (London: Macmillan, 1917), pp. 51–2. On this point, see ibid., p. 16; and Cox, Poetry and Politics, chapters 1 and 3, pp. 16–37, 82–122. On the intellectual intensity of Keats’s medical education, see de Almeida, Romantic Medicine; Donald C. Goellnicht, The PoetPhysician: Keats and Medical Science (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984); and John Keats’s Anatomical and Physiological Note Book, ed. M. B. Forman (London: Oxford University Press, 1934). Kucich, ‘Keats’s Literary Tradition’, p. 238. For Keats’s reading and library,
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51. 52. 53. 54.
55. 56. 57.
58. 59.
John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment
see Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (London, 1878), pp. 123–4; KC, I, 253–60; and LJK, I, 141, 237, 369; II, 70, 100, 234. Spadafora, The Idea of Progress, p. 388. Porter, Enlightenment, p. xvii. On this point, see James Unger, ‘The Resurgence of Smithian Scholarship’, Polity, 12 (1980), 493. Evert, Aesthetic and Myth; and E. B. Hungerford, Shores of Darkness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941). On Keats and religion, see also Ronald A. Sharpe, Keats, Skepticism, and the Religion of Beauty (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1979). O’Brien, Narrative of Enlightenment, p. 11. Christian Delacampagne, ‘The Enlightenment Project: A Reply to Schmidt’, Political Theory, 29 (2001), 81. On the Enlightenment’s designation as period and/or process, see James Schmidt, ‘Inventing the Enlightenment: ‘Anti-Jacobins, British Hegelians, and the Oxford English Dictionary’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64 (2003), 421–43. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 32. De Almeida, Romantic Medicine, p. 13.
Chapter 1 1. On this point, see Spadafora, The Idea of Progress, pp. 35–42, esp. pp. 35–6. For the background to the debate, see Joseph M. Levine, Between the Ancients and the Moderns: Baroque Culture in Restoration England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999); and Richard Foster Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Background of the Battle of the Books (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Press, 1936). 2. All references are to William Mavor, Universal History, Ancient and Modern from the Earliest Records of Time to the General Peace of 1801, 25 vols (London, 1802), hereafter referred to as Universal History and cited in the main text. For Keats’s reading of Mavor, see Clarke, Recollections, p. 124. 3. Cf. Hugh Blair, who argues that modern superiority was shown in painting, humour and ridicule, the more complex kinds of poetry, and drama, Lectures on Rhetoric, II, 246–89, esp. pp. 253–4. Mavor concurs with respect to modern painting and music, Universal History, I, 67. 4. See, e.g., Samuel Johnson, ‘Dryden’, in The Lives of the English Poets: And a Criticism on their Works, 3 vols (London, 1779–81), I, 421; and Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, 4 vols (London, 1774–81), I, v. For an overview of the most important eighteenth-century literary histories, see René Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), chapter 5, pp. 133-65. 5. See David Fairer’s Introduction to Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry, 4 vols, introd. David Fairer (London: Routledge, 1998), I, 3. Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) also praises the ‘gothic’ character of medieval and Renaissance poetry, and attacks the French School of poetry. On this point, see Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), pp. 109–10.
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6. See, e.g., Warton, The History of English Poetry, III, 47, 496, 501. 7. For a discussion of this essay, see David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (1983; repr. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999), chapter 3, pp. 104–49, esp. pp. 116–29. 8. On this point, see Tyler Cowan, In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 80–1. 9. Hazlitt’s lectures were delivered at the Surrey Institute in January and February 1818, and subsequently at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand, London in April and May 1818. For Keats’s attendance, see Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, pp. 367–8; and Stephen Coote, John Keats: A Life (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995), pp. 124–7. 10. Vincent Newey, ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 179. 11. For a concise definition of negative capability, see John Keats, Selected Letters, ed. Jon Mee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 381 n. 35. See also LJK, I, 184–5, 193–4. 12. On Keats’s style in Endymion, see Walter Jackson Bate, The Stylistic Development of John Keats (New York: Humanities Press, 1958), p. 22. On the sources of Endymion, see Keats’s Endymion: A Critical Edition, ed. Stephen T. Steinhoff (Troy, NY: The Whitston Publishing Co., 1987), pp. 14–39. 13. On whether Keats considered Wordsworth’s anxiety for humanity to be disabling, see John Barnard, John Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 61. 14. For an excellent overview of the concept of representativeness, see Chandler, England in 1819, pp. 174–94. On Hazlitt, see also Roy Parks, Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 206–36. 15. On exemplary history, see G. H. Nadel, ‘The Philosophy of History before Historicism’, History and Theory, 3 (1964), 311–14; and J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp. 246–49. 16. All references are to David Hume, The History of England From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 8 vols (1754–62; London, 1792), referred to hereafter as The History of England and cited in the main text. 17. All references are to Le Siècle de Louis XIV, 2 vols (1751; London, 1753), hereafter cited in the main text. A copy of the history was in Keats’s library at his death, KC, I, 256. Voltaire was a favourite of Hunt and Cowden Clarke. See Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense, pp. 49, 73; and Richard Altick, The Cowden Clarkes (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), pp. 52–3. 18. This point is argued by O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp. 34–5. 19. Ward, The Making of a Poet, p. 18. 20. For a similar argument in relation to Keats and Wordsworth, see Chandler, England in 1819, p. 424. On Hazlitt’s ‘reformer’s “spirit of contradiction”’, see ibid., pp. 183–4. 21. On Keats’s use of the phrase ‘vulgar superstition’, see Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense, pp. 87–113, esp. p. 98. D’Holbach’s Christianity Unveiled was published by Richard Carlile as the second volume of The Deist in 1819. Keats mentions The Deist in a letter to the George Keatses of 14 February
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22. 23.
24. 25.
26.
27. 28.
29. 30.
31. 32. 33. 34.
John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment
1819, LJK, II, 62. On this point, see Terence Allan Hoagwood, ‘Keats, Fictionality, and Finance: The Fall of Hyperion’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 132, 142 n. 7. For this argument, see Steinhoff, Keats’s Endymion, p. 15. For this argument, see Bate, John Keats, p. 322. On Johnson, see Chandler, England in 1819, pp. 174–5; and Charles H. Hinnant, ‘Steel for the Mind’: Samuel Johnson and Critical Discourse (Newark, DE: Associated University Presses, 1994). For Keats’s reading of these histories at Enfield school, see Clarke, Recollections, pp. 123–4. All references are to William Robertson, The History of Scotland During the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI, 2 vols (London, 1759), referred to hereafter as The History of Scotland and cited in the main text. All references are to William Robertson, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, 3 vols (London, 1769), referred to hereafter as The History of Charles V and cited in the main text. On feudalism and other aspects of early British history, Keats also owned a copy of Edmund Davies’s Celtic Researches (1804), The History of King Arthur (which was probably a version of Malory) and John Selden’s Titles of Honor (1614), KC, I, 254, 259. Kucich, ‘Keats’s Literary Tradition’, p. 245. Mary Fernley-Sander, ‘Philosophical History and The Scottish Reformation: William Robertson and the Knoxian Tradition’, The Historical Journal, 33 (1990), 324. On Robertson’s representation of Luther, see Neil Hargraves, ‘Revelation of Character in Eighteenth-Century Historiography and William Robertson’s History of the Reign of Charles V’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 27.2 (2003), 42. For an overview of attitudes towards Robertson’s religious toleration and for a contrary view, see Alexander Du Toit. ‘God Before Mammon? William Robertson, Episcopacy and the Church of England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 54 (2003), 671–90. For Keats’s own editions of Dictionnaire philosophique and the Essai sur les mœurs, see KC, I, 258–9. All references are to Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations, ed. René Pomeau, 2 vols (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1963), hereafter referred to as the Essai sur les mœurs and cited in the main text. On Voltaire’s attitude towards the nobility, see O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 39. In his essay ‘Of Nobility’ in The Essayes, a copy of which Keats owned, Francis Bacon also argues that a numerous nobility causes poverty and inconveniences the state, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (London, 1673), pp. 41–2. For these arguments, see O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 139. Womersley, Transformation, pp. 135, 136. See Gay’s Introduction to Philosophic Dictionary, trans. Peter Gay (New York: Basic Books, 1962), p. 14. In spite of the latent classicism of his own History of England, Hume famously sets out an example of this kind of empirical methodology in ‘Of Miracles’. A wise man,’ he maintains, ‘proportions his belief to the evidence’, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 110, hereafter cited in the main text. On
Notes
35. 36. 37.
38.
39.
41.
42.
43. 44.
45.
46.
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testimonial evidence in ‘Of Miracles,’ see Robert J. Fogelin, A Defense of Hume on Miracles (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003). For these arguments, see Womersley, Transformation, p. 139. Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 102–21. Vincent Newey has noted the tentativeness in Keats’s view of historical progress, ‘“Alternate Uproar and Sad Peace”: Keats, Politics, and the Idea of Revolution’, in J. R. Watson (ed.), ‘The French Revolution in English Literature and Art Special Number’, Modern Humanities Research Association Yearbook of English Studies, 19 (1989), 282. Clarke included extracts from Bolingbroke’s Patriot King in his commonplace book. On Keats’s access to the book, see John Barnard, ‘Charles Cowden Clarke’s “Cockney” Commonplace Book’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 73. On sectarianism in Louis XIV, see O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp. 43–5. All future references to Dictionnaire philosophique are to Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. De Beauchot, nouvelle édition (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1879), vols 17, 18, 19, 20, referred to hereafter as Œuvres complètes and cited in the main text. On ‘Secte’, see Œuvres complètes, 20, IV, 414–17: ‘Toute secte, en quelque genre que ce puisse être, est ralliement du doute et de l’erreur’ (IV, 414). Kucich, ‘Keats’s Literary Tradition’, pp. 239–40. On Keats’s anxiety, see, e.g., Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 32. For more positive interpretations, see, e.g., Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 17, 222–3; Barnard, John Keats, pp. 31–2; and Newey, ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, p. 165. On this point, see Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley and Romantic Spenserianism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), chapter 3, pp. 137–83. On the sentimentalism of the early poems, see, e.g., Bhabtosh Chatterjee, John Keats: His Mind and Work (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1971), p. 211. Cf. Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 133–4, who argues for the ‘astonishing candour’ of the ‘juvenile’ Keats. Cox, Poetry and Politics, p. 85. Phillips, Society and Sentiment, p. 165. See also John Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 114–18; and T. P. Peardon, The Transition in English Historical Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933), p. 106. For a psychological interpretation of Warton’s History, see James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 84–8. On the lingering authority of Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ and so-called ‘Wartonian’ models, see, e.g., Robert Griffin, Wordsworth’s Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse. See Fairer’s Introduction to Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry, I, 3; and Warton, The History of Poetry, IV, 123.
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47. Leigh Hunt, The Feast of the Poets With Other Pieces in Verse, 2nd edn (London, 1815), pp. 54–7, 41–5, 31–41 (esp. p. 34), 66–70 (esp. p. 69). See also Hunt’s later reference to the ‘downfall of the French school of poetry’ in the Preface to Foliage; Or Poems Original and Translated (London, 1818), p. 9. For Newey’s argument that Keats had read Warton, see ‘“Alternate Uproar and Sad Peace”’, 271. 48. Francis Jeffrey, Review of The Dramatic Works of John Ford, Edinburgh Review, 18 (August 1811), 278; and Review of The Works of Jonathan Swift (1815) by Walter Scott, Edinburgh Review, 27 (September 1816), 1. 49. For a similar argument, see Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers (London, 1819), p. 95, and his Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, pp. 254–6, also in HW, VI, 50, 76, 313–14. 50. For representations of British literary history focusing on Jeffrey, see Phillips, Society and Sentiment, chapter 10, pp. 282–94. On what constituted British literature, see Howard Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 51. Phillips, Society and Sentiment, p. 288. 52. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 5, 88, 99. 53. The specifically British setting of the poem is noted by Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, p. 32. 54. Keach, ‘Cockney Couplets’, 186. 55. Kucich, ‘Keats’s Literary Tradition’, pp. 251–2. On the related Ode to Apollo, also a reworking of Hunt’s Feast of the Poets and possibly Gray’s Progress of Poesy, see PJK, p. 14. 56. On the reviews of Keats’s first volume and the political implications of his ‘Cockney style’, see Keach, ‘Cockney Couplets’; Roe, Culture of Dissent, pp. 16–20; Jerome McGann, ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’, MLN, 94 (1979), 996–9; Theodore Redpath, The Young Romantics and Critical Opinion 1807–1824 (London: Harrap, 1973), pp. 418–21; and John O. Hayden, The Romantic Reviewers, 1802–1824 (London: Routledge, 1969), pp. 188–96. 57. Newey, ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, p. 172. 58. Hunt, The Feast of the Poets, pp. 97, 107, 78. Keats alludes to this note twice in his letters when writing on Wordsworth, LJK, I, 224, 299. On Hunt’s view of Wordsworth more generally, see The Feast of the Poets, pp. 86–109, esp. pp. 94–5. For Hunt’s view of Byron, see ibid., pp. 94–5, 129. See also Peacock’s comments on Byron’s ‘black bile’ in a letter to Shelley dated 30 May 1818, in The Halliford Edition of the Works of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith and C. E. Jones, 10 vols (London: Constable, 1930), VIII, 193. 59. For this argument, see Jack Stillinger, The Hoodwinking of Madeline, pp. 1–13. Keats was ambivalent towards Wordsworth and Hunt, LJK, I, 224–5. On Keats’s categorisation of Hunt with Wordsworth because of their ‘idiomatic spirit in verse’, see Gittings, John Keats, p. 106. 60. This phrase is from Hunt’s Story of Rimini (1816) and is quoted as an introductory epigraph to the poem. For a discussion of Hunt’s representations of the suburban landscape, see Roe, Culture of Dissent, pp. 126–30. For
Notes
61.
62. 63.
64.
65. 66. 67. 68.
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an analysis of the poem as a kind of unintentional demystification of topographical poetry, see Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, pp. 231–45. Ibid., pp. 236, 238–9. See also Newey’s emphasis in Keats’s poetry of a ‘strain of virile humanism’ which Levinson attempts to deny in favour of his more subversive ‘anti-nature’ or ‘vulgarity’, ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, p. 166. Peacock, Halliford, VIII, 13, 19–20, 20–1. See Jeffrey’s review of Byron’s The Corsair: a Tale (1814) and The Bride of Abydos: a Turkish Tale (1813), Edinburgh Review, 23 (April 1814), 199, 200. Phillips, Society and Sentiment, pp. 290–2. See, e.g., the articles in Blackwood’s for May, July and August 1818, and October 1819, such as ‘Letter from Z. to Leigh Hunt, King of the Cockneys’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 3 (May 1818), 196–201. See also ‘On Shakespeare and Ben Jonson’, HW, VI, 36. Francis Jeffrey, Review of Specimens of the British Poets (1819) by Thomas Campbell, Edinburgh Review, 31 (March 1819), 468. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, pp. 237, 238. Phillips, Society and Sentiment, p. 259. On the importance of periodicals in the formation of reading publics, see John Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
Chapter 2 1. Cox, Poetry and Politics, p. 23. 2. On this point, see Mee, Selected Letters, p. xxii; and Roe, Culture of Dissent, chapter 8, pp. 202–29, esp. pp. 206–12. 3. Kucich, Romantic Spenserianism, p. 139. 4. For an example of a review which describes Keats’s poetry as a malady or sickness, see article No. 4 by ‘Z’ in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 3 (August 1818), 519. For Lockhart’s campaign against sentiment in Blackwood’s, see J. H. Alexander, ‘Blackwood’s: Magazine as Romantic Form’, Wordsworth Circle, 15.2 (1984), 57–69. 5. On the revival of the chivalric tradition in the period, see Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1981). 6. See, e.g., Robertson, Charles V, I, 22–30. Adam Smith maintains a similar view in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1776), I, 459–65, 494–510. 7. Warton, The History of English Poetry, I, 109. Warton also attributes the emergence of the romance form to the crusades, ibid., I, ii. 8. Kucich, Romantic Spenserianism, pp. 155–6. 9. It is unclear when Keats read or acquired the volumes, but all the circumstantial evidence suggests that it was in early to mid-1817. He read another Spanish quest romance, Amadis of Gaul, in May 1817 and both are referred to in Don Quixote. An annotation in Keats’s copy of Palmerin in the Houghton Collection, Harvard University notes that Leigh Hunt suggested that all three notes were made by Keats. Another annotation advises that only the first note was made by Keats. For Southey’s comment, see Palmerin of
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England, trans. R. Southey, 4 vols (London, 1807), I, xxxvi. 10. In the first category, see, e.g., I, 110, 157, 165, 184, 193; II, 129, 235, 374. In the second category, see, e.g., I, 43, 63, 121, 155, 171, 189, 320; II, 379; III, 104. 11. On knights, see ibid., I, 53, 166; II, 128. For markings of armour, horses and jousts, see I, 109, 319–23; II, 129. 12. For Keats’s markings of mournful and sorrowful landscapes, see I, 171, 172; III, 243, 283, 284. For descriptions of ruins, see, e.g., I, 153. For descriptions of sorrowful complexions or tears, see, e.g., I, 43, 155, 184, 344. 13. For the ‘Knight of the Vaulted Chamber’, see I, 157, 161, 212. For the Knight of Death, see, e.g., I, 192–3. On blood and wounds, e.g., I, 63, 187, 189, 193, 251. 14. Ibid., I, 69. 15. The reference to Byron is from Manfred (1817), I, i, 10: ‘Sorrow is knowledge’. 16. Harold Bloom, ‘The Internalization of Quest-Romance’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), p. 6. See also Barnard, John Keats, p. 35. 17. On the emergence of sentimental models of history, see, e.g., Phillips, Society and Sentiment; and D. Castiglione and L. Sharpe (eds), Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1995). 18. Daniel Watkins rightly argues that the remaining inductions support the sentimental model of history set out in the second induction, Politics of the Imagination, p. 51. 19. For the argument that Keats rejects history and reality, see, e.g., Northrop Frye, A Study of English Romanticism (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 37; and Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), p. 389. For the alternative argument, see Kucich, ‘Keats’s Literary Tradition’, p. 252; and Newey, ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, pp. 172–3. 20. This lecture was also given a lengthy notice in the Examiner, 27 December 1818, pp. 825–6. Keats had read a number of Scott’s and Godwin’s novels by 1818 including The Antiquary, The Heart of Midlothian, Mandeville and possibly Guy Mannering; and even later read Godwin’s Life of Chaucer (LJK, I, 199, 200, 336; II, 161). 21. William Godwin, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (London, 1803), pp. x, viii, xi, x. 22. William Godwin, ‘Of History and Romance’, in Caleb Williams or Things as They Are, ed. M. Hindle (London: Penguin, 1988), pp. 359–73. Godwin intended his essay for The Enquirer (1797) in which he planned to promote a new sort of intellectual by focusing on ‘the humbler walks of private life’, The Enquirer. Essays on Education, Manners and Literature (London, 1797), p. x. On the decline of radicalism after the French revolution, see Mark Philp, ‘English Republicanism in the 1790’s’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 6 (1998), 235–62; and Godwin’s Political Justice (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1986), chapter 10, 214–30. On the essay more generally, see Phillips, Society and Sentiment, pp. 118–22. 23. Godwin, ‘Of History and Romance’, pp. 359–60, 360, 361. Godwin puts
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25.
26. 27.
28. 29. 30.
31.
32. 33.
34.
35. 36. 37.
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forward a similar argument against system and abstraction in the preface to The Enquirer, p. vi. See Scott’s comments on Warton in his Review of Ellis’s Specimens of the Early English Poets, Edinburgh Review, 4 (April 1804), 153. On Godwin, see his Review of On the Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1803) by William Godwin, Edinburgh Review, 3 (January 1804), 440. Walter Scott, ‘Essay on Chivalry’, in The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, VI, 8–9. ‘Essay on Romance’, VI, 141, 190. ‘Essay on Chivalry’, VI, 8, 85–6. ‘Essay on Romance’, VI, 170. Scott’s intellectual debt to the philosophic historians of the Scottish Enlightenment is by now a commonplace. See, e.g., Peter D. Garside, ‘Scott and the “Philosophical” Historians’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (1975), 497–512; David Daiches, ‘Sir Walter Scott and History’, Etudes Anglais, 24 (1971), 458–77; and Duncan Forbes, ‘The Rationalism of Sir Walter Scott’, Cambridge Journal, 7 (1953), 20–35. Scott, ‘Essay on Romance’, VI, 169. On this point, see Chandler, England in 1819, p. 339. Walter Scott, ‘Essay on Drama’, in The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, VI, 276, 277. See also Walter Scott, Review of Ellis and Ritson, Edinburgh Review, 6 (January 1806), 411, 388. This point is made by Mee, Selected Letters, p. 414 n. 303. O’Neill, ‘Writing and History’, p. 145. John Barnard, ‘Endymion: “Pretty Paganism” and “Purgatory Blind”’, in Hermione de Almeida (ed.), Critical Essays on John Keats (Boston, MA: GK Hall & Co., 1990), p. 50. Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense, pp. 41–2. On Keats’s deism, see also Ryan’s ‘The Politics of Greek Religion’, in Hermione de Almeida (ed.), Critical Essays on John Keats (Boston, MA: GK Hall & Co., 1990), p. 265. Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, p. 40. For this argument, see, e.g., Dickstein, Keats and his Poetry, pp. 76–7; and Steinhoff, Keats’s Endymion, p. 18. Several critics have argued that Endymion responds directly to Shelley’s Alastor (1816) and Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814). See, e.g., ibid., pp. 30–1; Bloom, Visionary Company, p. 389; and Leonard Brown, ‘The Genesis, Growth, and Meaning of “Endymion”’, Studies of Philology, 30 (1933), 618–53. For this argument, see Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, pp. 40–1; and Dickstein, Keats and his Poetry, pp. 71, 75, who notes that in lines 95–106 there lies an ambiguous note of ‘destructiveness’. Newey, ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, p. 171. Ibid., pp. 170–1. Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, p. 43. See also Newell F. Ford, The Prefigurative Imagination of John Keats (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1951), p. 14; and Dickstein, Keats and his Poetry, pp. 87, 89–90. For a neo-Platonic reading, see Claude Lee Finney, The Evolution of Keats’s Poetry (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1936), pp. 298–9. Cf. Evert, Aesthetic and Myth, pp. 118–22. For this argument, see, e.g., Earl Wasserman, The Finer Tone: Keats’s Major Poems (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953), pp. 27, 40, 54–5.
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39. On this point, see Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, p. 45; and William Garrett, ‘The Glaucus Episode: An Interpretation of Book III of Endymion’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 27 (1978), 34. 40. Newey, ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, p. 174. The interdependence of Endymion and Glaucus is also noted by Steinhoff, Keats’s Endymion, p. 31; and Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 391. On the significance of the Indian Maid, see Steinhoff, Keats’s Endmyion, pp. 236–7. 41. On the Scottish Enlightenment rejection of contractarianism and the alternative emphasis on intuition and affection, see Christopher J. Berry, ‘Sociality and Socialisation’, in Alexander Broadie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 243–57; and Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh, University Press, 1997), p. 28. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Duncan Forbes (1767; repr. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), pp. 16, 17, On the relationship between morality and society in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, see ‘Sociality and Socialisation’, pp. 253–4. 42. Newey, ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, p. 173. 43. Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, p. 45. 44. Ibid., p. 46. 45. On Wordsworth’s influence on this passage, see Steinhoff, Keats’s Endymion, pp. 18–19. On the significance of the word ‘dark’ in Romantic writing, see Frye, A Study of English Romanticism, p. 33. 46. Morris Dickstein, ‘Keats and Politics’, Studies in Romanticism, 25 (1986), 178. 47. See, e.g., Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense, pp. 158–68. 48. All references are to William Robertson, The History of America, 2 vols (London, 1777), hereafter cited in the main text. On this point, see O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 157. 49. All references are to Constantin-François Volney, The Ruins: or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires: by M. Volney … Translated from the French (1791; London, 1795), hereafter referred to as Ruins and cited in the main text. 50. Evert, Aesthetic and Myth, p. 163. On post-visionary doubt, see Stuart A. Ende, Keats and the Sublime (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 60. 51. Chandler, England in 1819, p. 405. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 135. For a discussion of the problems of intelligibility, see also Stillinger, The Hoodwinking of Madeline, pp. 36–8; and LJK, II, 162–3. On the poem’s image logic, see the notes to PJK, pp. 452, 461. On Keats’s pictorialism and his use of synaesthetic imagery, see John Barnard, ‘Keats’s Tactile Vision: “Ode to Psyche” and the Early Poetry’, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 33 (1982), 1–24. 52. Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, p. 67. 53. All references are to Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, A Poem (London, 1805) and line numbers are cited in the main text. On the imagery of breath, see PJK, p. 453. On borrowings from Scott’s poems, see PJK, pp. 460, 466, 467, 469. On the trope of the ‘last of the race’, see Fiona J. Stafford, The Last of the Race: the Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin (Oxford:
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Clarendon Press, 1994). 54. See Jeffrey’s review of The Lay of the Last Minstrel: A Poem (1805) by Walter Scott, Edinburgh Review, 6 (April 1805), 1–20. 55. The poem was written in Scotland on the way to Kirkcudbright on 2 July 1818, LJK, I, 311–12. Allott notes that Keats had not read Scott’s Guy Mannering (1814), which has the character Meg Merrilies, but that Brown chatted to Keats about the novel on the trip (PJK, p. 358). On this point, see Claire Lamont, ‘Meg the Gipsy in Scott and Keats’, English, 36 (1987), 137–45. 56. See Phillips, Society and Sentiment, pp. 92–7, 110–15. For a general discussion of historiographical innovations, particularly in the work of female historians, see William Stafford, ‘Narratives of Women: English Feminists of the 1790’s’, History, 82 (1997), 24–42. 57. Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance: Forms Against Context in Painting and Literature (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 69. 58. Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, p. 65. 59. See, e.g., William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty made in the summer of the year 1770 (London, 1782), p. 98. On Keats’s visits to medieval and neo-gothic buildings at Chichester and Stanstead, see PJK, pp. 454, 461, 466; and Robert Gittings, John Keats: The Living Year 21 September 1818 to 21 September 1819 (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1954), pp. 79–80. On the literary interest in ruins, see Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). On religious monuments and the picturesque, see Nicholas Penny, Church Monuments in Romantic England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), esp. pp. 113–14. More generally, see Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (eds), The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape, and Aesthetics since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 60. Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, p. 67. 61. On Porphyro as barbarian and villain, see Stillinger, The Hoodwinking of Madeline, pp. 77–82. On Madeline’s passivity, see Elizabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge Press, 1992), p. 142. On Madeline’s suspension of desire, see also Peter Brooks, Body Works: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). For multiple readings of The Eve, see Jack Stillinger, Reading The Eve of St. Agnes: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transactions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 62. Keats’s copy of Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Moriae encomium seu laus stultitae or The Praise of Folly (pub. 1511) would have introduced him to some of the more corrupt practices of the Catholic Church. On the topic of anti-Catholic sentiment, see E. R. Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968). 63. On the ‘feminine’ aspects of Keats’s poetry, see Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Feminizing Keats’, in Hermione de Almeida (ed.), Critical Essays on John Keats (Boston, MA: GK Hall & Co., 1990), pp. 317–56; and Marlon Ross, ‘Beyond the Fragmented Word: Keats and the Limit of Patrilineal Language’, in Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland (eds), Out of Male Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism (Amherst, MA: Amherst University Press, 1990),
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pp. 110–31. On gender relations in Keats’s work and Romantic poetry more generally, see Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism & Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). 64. On Hazlitt’s identification of dreaming with the involuntary process of the poetic imagination, see Uttara Natarajan, Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense: Criticism, Morals, and the Metaphysics of Power (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 64–72. 65. Chandler, England in 1819, pp. 407, 404. See also Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, pp. 82–4.
Chapter 3 1. For the composition history of the Hyperion poems, see Kenneth Muir, ‘The Meaning of Hyperion’, in Kenneth Muir (ed.), John Keats: A Reassessment (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969), pp. 103–23, esp. pp. 103–4; and PJK, pp. 394–59, 655–7. 2. As previously noted, Ward and Sperry argue that Keats had already begun reading Voltaire in 1810–15, Ward, John Keats, p. 27; and Sperry, ‘Keats’s Skepticism’, 75. 3. On the influence of Voltaire on Robertson’s work, see O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp. 134–5, 139, 153. On the influence of Voltaire more generally, see R. S. Crane, ‘The Diffusion of Voltaire’s Writings in England, 1750–1800’, Modern Philology, 20 (1923), 261–74. 4. On Birkbeck, see Chandler, England in 1819, pp. 454–9; and Robertson, ‘Keats’s New World’, pp. 38–41. 5. Gittings claims that Keats’s copy of The History of America was a twovolume 1808 edition, John Keats: The Living Year, pp. 109, 209. On Robertson’s abandonment of the North American section, see Jeffrey R. Smitten, ‘Moderatism and History: William Robertson’s Unfinished History of British America’, in Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten (eds), Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), pp. 163–79. 6. Fiona Robertson, ‘British Romantic Columbiads’, Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, 2.1 (1998), 1. For the idea that Keats was rereading The History of America for personal reasons, see Harold E. Briggs, ‘Keats, Robertson, and “That Most Hateful Land”’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 59 (1944), 188. 7. For the influence on Keats’s letters, see Kucich, ‘Keats’s Literary Tradition’, p. 241. For On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, see ibid., pp. 242–4; Robertson, ‘Keats’s New World’, pp. 31–4; and Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, pp. 26–31. On the question of historical suffering, see Butler, Romantics, Reactionaries and Revolutionaries, p. 151; Alan J. Bewell, ‘The Political Implications of Keats’s Classicist Aesthetics’, Studies in Romanticism, 25 (1986), 220–9; and Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, p. 88. Cf. Stillinger, who argues that Hyperion’s emphasis on sympathy and suffering is not the key to the poem, The Hoodwinking of Madeline, p. 47. 8. Keats owned the French 1804–5 edition (KC, I, 259). All future references to La Philosophie are to the previously cited edition of the Essai sur les
Notes
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11. 12.
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mœurs, ed. René Pomeau and will appear in the main text. On the primitive encounter in Wordsworth studies, see Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, pp. 41–4, 59, 72. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 134. For a general overview of Robertson’s life and work, see Stewart J. Brown, ‘William Robertson (1721– 1793) and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Stewart J. Brown (ed.), William Robertson and Expansion of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 7–35. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (1689–90; New York: New American Library, 1963), p. 345. Spadafora, The Idea of Progress, p. 269. Adam Ferguson argued, for example, that it is in the current Arab clans and American tribes ‘that we are to behold, as in a mirrour, the features of our own progenitors’, History of Civil Society, pp. 80–1. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 133. Chandler, England in 1819, p. 128. On Robertson, see O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 143. On the differences between the various Scottish stadial theorists, see Spadafora, The Idea of Progress, pp. 251–6; and Meek, Ignoble Savage, chapters 4 and 5, pp. 99–130, 131–76. On this point, see, e.g., History of America, I, 49. On Robertson’s view of historical change as circumstantial rather than natural, see O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 154; Spadafora, The Idea of Progress, p. 254; and Meek, Ignoble Savage, pp. 160–76, esp. pp. 171–3. For the argument that the Scots’ notion of historical development was not progressive, see Duncan Forbes’s Introduction, in Ferguson, Civil Society, p. xiv. For a contrary view, see Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945), pp. 14–15; and Spadafora, The Idea of Progress, chapter 5, pp. 253– 320, esp. pp. 253–5. On Robertson’s complex attitude towards stadial theory, see O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp. 133–4, 141; and Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Providence and Progress: An Introduction to the Historical Thought of William Robertson’, in Stewart J. Brown (ed.), William Robertson and Expansion of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 55–73, esp. pp. 68–73. On natural law, see Duncan Forbes, ‘Natural Law and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in R. H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner (eds), The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), pp. 186–204. On the natives and barbarism, see O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 160; and, e.g., History of America, I, 291–2. See the Introduction to La Philosophie, ed. J. H. Brumfitt, 2nd edn, in The Complete Works of Voltaire, ed. Theodore Besterman et al. (Geneva and Toronto: Institute et Musée Voltaire and University of Toronto Press, 1968), LIX, 43–4. On the limitations of Robertson’s sympathy towards the Native American Indians, see Stewart J. Brown, ‘An Eighteenth-Century Historian on the Amerindians: Culture, Colonialism and Christianity in William Robertson’s History of America’, Studies in World Christianity, 2.2 (1996), 213; Jeffrey Smitten, ‘Impartiality in Robertson’s History of America’, Eighteenth-
176
18. 19.
20.
21.
22.
23. 24.
25.
26.
27. 28. 29.
30. 31. 32. 33.
John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment Century Studies, 19 (1985), 65; and Lenman, ‘“From Savage to Scot”’, pp. 200–9. Cf. Alexander Du Toit, ‘Who are the Barbarians? Scottish Views of Conquest and Indians, and Robertson’s History of America’, Scottish Literary Journal, 26.1 (1999), 35–7. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 20. For a discussion of the North American section of the history, see ibid., pp. 161–3. On the Essai sur les mœurs, see Meek, Ignoble Savage, p. 174. Edward Holmes states that Keats read Marmontel’s Incas at school (KC, II, 164). Keats owned a French edition (KC, I, 259). All references are to JeanFrançois Marmontel, The Incas: Or, The Destruction of the Empire of Peru, 2 vols (London, 1777), hereafter cited in the main text. For descriptions of the Spanish torture of the Incas, see ibid., pp. i–xii. See, e.g., Examiner, 25 August 1816, 534; 17 August 1817, 520; 7 September 1817, 566–7; and 2 August 1818, 482. On Portugal and its Brazilian colonies, see ibid., 1 June 1817, 337–8. That Keats was still regularly reading the Examiner in 1817–18 is evident from LJK, I, 180, 199. Although Robertson believes that the Spanish have improved in their adherence to free trade, he is less optimistic in this regard than Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations, II, 160–3. On the way in which America was used to develop a model of ‘historically constituted subjectivity’, see Chandler, England in 1819, chapter 8, pp. 441–80. Ibid., pp. 447, 453. For a more detailed discussion of the historiographical debates surrounding the American colonies, see ibid., pp. 441–80; and Colley, Britons: Forging a Nation, pp. 132–43. Chandler rightly points out that Keats’s argument here is very similar to Shelley’s ambiguous celebration of America in A Philosophical View of Reform as ‘the full realization of the eighteenth-century ideal of utility’, while at the same time suggesting that ‘England’s resistance to utilitarianism affords it ultimately brighter social prospects’, England in 1819, pp. 476, 191, 477–8. For the argument that Keats is endorsing a vision of historical improvement, see Newey, ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, p. 177. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 54. On Voltaire’s lack of reference to the four stages theory, see Meek, Ignoble Savage, pp. 97–8. On his rejection of the natural law school, see Brumfitt, La Philosophie, LIX, 44. Ibid., LIX, 77–8. See also Voltaire’s very similar comments in Dictionnaire philosophique, Œuvres complètes, 17, 460–1; 18, 358. Cf. Voltaire’s materialist argument that man has developed slowly over time in chapter IV, ‘De la connaissance de l’âme’, Essai, I, 11–12. See also the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Louis XIV, II, 185–213. On the way in which Voltaire often postpones the modernity of the age of Louis XIV, see O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 43. On the negative effects of mining for silver and gold, see History of America, II, 391–2, 395–7. Sperry, ‘Keats’s Skepticism’, 81; and see also Brumfitt, La Philosophie, LIX, 54. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 35. Brumfitt, La Philosophie, LIX, 52. On the influence of Lamarck, Darwin and
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36. 37.
38. 39. 40. 41.
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44. 45.
46.
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Buffon, see de Almeida, Romantic Medicine, pp. 11, 107, 109. See also A. D. Atkinson, ‘Keats and Kamchatka’, Notes and Queries, 196 (1951), 343–5. Keats’s reference to Kamchatka is in his letter to Reynolds dated 25 March 1818, LJK, I, 263. Keats may have come across a similarly materialist analysis of man’s operation in society in Volney’s Ruins, p. 33. On theories of perfectibility, see Spadafora, The Idea of Progress, pp. 246–7, 302–4. For biological theories, see de Almeida, Romantic Medicine, p. 231. For Godwin’s views, see William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence of Morals and Happiness, 2 vols (London, 1793), I, 43–50. Sperry, ‘Keats’s Skepticism’, 83, 84–5. See also the discussion of the end of Keats’s ‘Epistle to Reynolds’ in Hoxie N. Fairchild, ‘Keats and the Strugglefor-Existence Tradition’, PMLA, 64.1 (1949), 110. Kucich, ‘Keats’s Literary Tradition’, pp. 253–4. On the progress poem as genre, see Bewell, ‘Keats’s Classicist Aesthetics’, 220. See Rosalind McKitterick’s and Roland Quinault’s Introduction, in Rosalind McKitterick and Roland Quinault (eds), Edward Gibbon and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 2, 7. Kucich, ‘Keats’s Literary Tradition’, p. 253. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 159. On this point, see Outram, Enlightenment, chapter 5, pp. 63–79, esp. pp. 66–7. The idea that the Titans are artifacts of either an infant or an ancient culture from the Egyptians to the Celts is not a new one. See, e.g., Bewell, ‘Keats’s Classicist Aesthetics’, 224; and Stafford, ‘Romantic Titanism’, pp. 179–80. Keats began Hyperion in February 1818 just after his walking tour of Scotland, and Hazlitt’s lectures on poetry had celebrated both Ossian and Burns. See Meek, Ignoble Savage, pp. 42–67. For Robertson’s comparisons of ancient peoples and the American Indians in Charles V (I, 211–12), see ibid., p. 139. For an overview of Robertson’s sources, see Lenman, ‘“From Savage to Scot”’, pp. 198–9. For Keats’s reading of Buffon’s Natural History, see LJK, II, 70–1, 247. See Brumfitt, La Philosophie, LIX, 41. On the influence of The Spirit of Laws on Robertson, see Phillipson, ‘Providence and Progress’, pp. 58–9. On the reception of Montesquieu in Scotland, see Richard B. Sher, ‘From Troglodytes to Americans: Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment on Liberty, Virtue, and Commerce’, in D. Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society 1649– 1776 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 368–402. All references are to Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, trans. Peter Nugent, 2 vols (London, 1750) and are cited in the main text. For eighteenth-century sources on the Native Americans, see Lee Eldridge Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians (Austin, TX and London: University of Texas Press, 1967). On eighteenth-century representations of South America, see Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, CT and London:
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Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 141–55. 47. On this point, see Outram, Enlightenment, pp. 75–6. 48. See Briggs, ‘Two Notes on Hazlitt and Keats’, 596–8, and ‘“That Most Hateful Land”’, 184–99. On Goldsmith, see W. F. Gallaway, Jr., ‘The Sentimentalism of Goldsmith’, PMLA, 48.4 (1933), 1167–81. Montesquieu also makes specific reference to the Chinese in The Spirit of Laws, I, 430–5. 49. On the importance of the word ‘vigour’ in Robertson’s histories, see O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 149. For a reading of the poem that draws on evolutionary discourses, see Hermione de Almeida, ‘Romantic Evolution: Fresh Perfection and Ebbing Process in Keats’, in Hermione de Almeida (ed.), Critical Essays on John Keats (Boston, MA: GK Hall & Co., 1990), pp. 279–92. 50. For a representation of Saturn as similar to ‘the pathetically reduced Napoleon’, see Dickstein, ‘Keats and Politics’, 180. 51. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 156. On the emergence of studies of North American Indians, see Meek, Ignoble Savage, pp. 218–19; and R. H. Pearce, The Savages of America, revised edn (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), chapter 3, pp. 76ff. 52. O’Brien, Narrative of Enlightenment, p. 160. See also History of America, I, 178–83. 53. On Hyperion’s nightmare of puzzlement, see Susan J. Wolfson, The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 266–8. 54. Bewell, ‘Keats’s Classicist Aesthetics’, 224. On Egyptian art and Napoleon, see ibid., 224–6; and Theresa M. Kelley, ‘Keats, Ekphrasis, and History’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 212–37, esp. pp. 219–21. On the impact of empire on the visual arts, see Rosamond McKitterick, ‘Edward Gibbon and the Early Middle Ages in Eighteenth-Century Europe’, in Rosamond McKitterick and Roland Quinault (eds), Edward Gibbon and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 162–89, esp. p. 173. 55. Brumfitt, La Philosophie, LIX, 62–3. See, e.g., Benoit de Maillet, Description de l’Egypte (Paris, 1735), p. 45. 56. See chapter 21 of La Philosophie, ‘Des monuments des Egyptiens’, Essai, I, 78–80. 57. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 157. 58. James Land Jones, Adam’s Dream: Mythic Consciousness in Keats and Yeats (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1975), p. 183. 59. For a reading of this passage which sees Saturn as a ‘sign’ of his former self, see Bewell, ‘Keats’s Classicist Aesthetics’, 226. For a different reading that focuses on devolution, see de Almeida, Romantic Medicine, pp. 269–77. 60. On the opening of the poem, see Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, pp. 204–5. For the influence of Hazlitt’s ideas regarding stasis on Hyperion, see Nicola Trott, ‘Keats and the Prison House of History’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 262–79, esp. pp. 271–2. 61. Robertson draws on Locke’s and Hume’s sceptical theory of knowledge. On this point, see Phillipson, ‘Progress and Providence’, pp. 65–6.
Notes 62. 63. 64. 65.
66. 67. 68. 69.
70. 71. 72. 73.
74.
75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.
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Jones, Adam’s Dream, p. 182. Ibid., pp. 182, 179. Muir, ‘The Meaning of Hyperion’, pp. 106–8, 107. On this point, see O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 39. On the dynamic nature of laws, see Colin Kidd, ‘The Ideological Significance of Robertson’s History of Scotland’, in Stewart J. Brown (ed.), William Robertson and Expansion of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 128. On this point, see Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 210. For a ‘life of allegory’ reading of the poem, see Trott, ‘Keats and the Prison House of History’, pp. 262–79, esp. pp. 268–73. See Briggs’s similar argument in relation to La Belle Dame Sans Merci in ‘“That Most Hateful Land”’, 194–9. Buffon, Natural History, I, 327–8, and Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Jean Piveteau (Paris, 1954), p. 191a, both cited in Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, pp. 238–73. Peacock, Halliford, VIII, 5. De Almeida, Romantic Medicine, pp. 279–81. On Keats’s literary imperialism, see also Chandler, England in 1819, pp. 432–40; and Robertson, ‘Keats’s New World’, pp. 27–47. William Mavor, An Historical Account of the Most Celebrated Voyages, Travels and Discoveries from the Time of Columbus to the Present Period, 12 vols (London, 1796–1801), hereafter referred to as Voyages and cited in the main text. For Keats’s reading of this text, see Clarke, Recollections, p. 124. On Robertson’s narrative of excited discovery, see O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 155. For the identification of Apollo with Napoleon, see Newey, ‘“Alternate Uproar and Sad Peace”’, 274; and Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 197, where Levinson argues for a Hyperion–Apollo (Louis–Napoleon) construction. For a comparison of Napoleon and Saturn, see Newey, ‘‘Alternate Uproar and Sad Peace”’, 280; and Dickstein, ‘Keats and Politics’, 180. The dual representation of Saturn and Apollo as Napoleon is itself suggestive of Keats’s ambivalence towards him (LJK, I, 397). On this point, see David Bromwich, ‘Keats’s Radicalism’, Studies in Romanticism, 25 (1986), 206–7. For an overview of the importance of Napoleon for Romantic writers, see Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Padgen, European Encounters, p. 100. More generally, see also ibid., chapter 3, pp. 89–115. On comparisons between Birkbeck and Columbus, see Chandler, England in 1819, pp. 454–9. Robertson, ‘British Romantic Columbiads’, 3, 7. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 155. On the trope of puzzlement in Keats’s representation of both the Titans and Apollo in Hyperion, see Wolfson, Questioning Presence, pp. 253–69. For this argument, see ibid.; Jones, Adam’s Dream, p. 187; and Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, pp. 207–8. Wolfson rightly argues that Oceanus evokes all of the negative connotations of the sophist, Questioning Presence, p. 258.
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82. Newey, ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, p. 178. 83. Hoagwood, ‘Keats, Fictionality, and Finance’, p. 139. O’Neill, ‘Writing and History’, p. 159. 84. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 203. For the traditional view of the stylistic change in the poem, see Bate, John Keats, pp. 403, 410. 85. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, pp. 203, 194. John Bayley, The Uses of Division: Unity and Disharmony in Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976), p. 123. 86. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 204. O’Neill, ‘Writing and History’, p. 159. 87. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 203. See also Kelley, ‘Keats, Ekphrasis, and History’, p. 221. O’Neill, ‘Writing and History’, p. 154. 88. On language theory, see Rüdiger Schreyer, ‘“Pray what Language did your wild Couple speak, when first they met?” – Language and the Science of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Peter Jones (ed.), The ‘Science of Man’ in the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Reid and their Contemporaries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), pp. 149–77. 89. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric, I, 100, 101, 102–3, 106, 112, 113. On gestures and expression more generally, see I, 101–6, 107, 108–10. 90. Blair, Critical Dissertation, p. 2. 91. See, e.g., ibid., I, 112. 92. On the significance of Apollo’s shriek, see Bewell, ‘Keats’s Classicist Aesthetics’, 229. 93. Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce in The Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), IV, 104, 111–13. 94. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric, I, 116; and Critical Dissertation, p. 21. For the idea than poetry was more ancient than prose, see also Lectures on Rhetoric, I, 115. Cf. Duff’s Essay on Original Genius (1767). 95. Blair, Critical Dissertation, p. 23. 96. On this point and on Keats’s ‘direct’ response to nature during his walking tour of Scotland, see Stafford, ‘Romantic Titanism’, pp. 166, 177–8. 97. For the argument that Keats elides the reality of conquest, see Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, pp. 26–31. 98. For the view that the poem is a rejection of Enlightenment models of history, see, e.g., Bewell, ‘Keats’s Classicist Aesthetics’, 229. J. C. Hilson, ‘Hume: The Historian as Man of Feeling’, p. 209. 99. O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp. 8, 7. On Hume’s sentimentalism, see Donald T. Siebert, The Moral Animus of David Hume (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1990), chapter 1, pp. 25–61; O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp. 60–9; and Phillips, Society and Sentiment, pp. 60–78. On Gibbon’s sensitivity to minute causality, see Womersley, Transformation, chapters 12–18. On Robertson’s sentimentalism in The History of Scotland, see O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp. 114–22. On Voltaire’s Louis XIV as tragic drama, see ibid., pp. 23–6. 100. For this view of Keats’s sentimentalism, see Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), chapter 4, cited in Bromwich, ‘Keats’s Radicalism’, 205. Cf. Michael O’Neill’s view that ‘[e]ven the “naïve” Keats is never less than
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‘sentimental’, ‘Writing and History’, p. 153. 101. On this point, see Mee, Selected Letters, p. 381 n. 36. See also pp. xxiv–xxv. 102. Ibid., p. 381 n. 36. On Hazlitt’s Letter to William Gifford and Keats’s imperialism more generally, see Chandler, England in 1819, pp. 432–40. 103. Stafford, ‘Romantic Titanism’, p. 179. For a similar discussion of Hazlitt’s reflections on Greek statues in relation to Ode on a Grecian Urn, see Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, pp. 390–2. 104. See O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp. 34–5. See also M. S. Rivière, ‘Voltaire’s Concept of Dramatic History in Le Siècle XIV’, SVEC, 284 (1991), 179–98. 105. On this point, see Howard Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 218–31. 106. Womersely, Transformation, p. 62. 107. On Hume’s use of sentimental techniques, see Peter Jones, ‘Hume and the Beginnings of Modern Aesthetics’, in Peter Jones (ed.), The ‘Science of Man’ in the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Reid and their Contemporaries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), pp. 54–67. On Hume’s representation of women, see Annette C. Baier, ‘Hume on Women’s Complexion’, in Peter Jones (ed.), The ‘Science of Man’ in the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Reid and their Contemporaries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), pp. 33–53. 108. On this point, see Hilson, ‘The Historian as Man of Feeling’, p. 118. On Robertson’s representation of Mary, see O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, pp. 118–22. 109. For the background to Scottish distrust of conquerors from the sixteenth century, see Du Toit, ‘Who are the Barbarians?’, 29–33. 110. For the various arguments used by Robertson for this purpose, see Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 45–52, 91–102. For Robertson’s views on las Casas, see Du Toit, ‘Who are the Barbarians?’, 31. 111. Ibid., 35. On Spanish avarice, see History of America, II, 349–50. On the negative effects of mining for silver and gold, see ibid., II, 391–2, 395–7. See also Adam Smith’s negative representation of the Spanish desire for gold in his Wealth of Nations, II, 153–5, 155–7. 112. See also the section on ‘Fanatisme’ in Dictionnaire philosophique, Œuvres complètes, 19, 76. On Voltaire, see O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment, p. 50. 113. Kucich, ‘Keats’s Literary Tradition’, pp. 254, 253. On various critical explanations for the abandonment of Hyperion, see Evert, Aesthetic and Myth, p. 238 n. 10. 114. Chandler, England in 1819, p. 429. See also David Womersely, ‘The Historical Writings of William Robertson’, 497–506. For a contrary view, see Lenman, ‘“From Savage to Scot”’, pp. 200–1. 115. All references are to Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols (London, 1776–88), hereafter referred to as The Decline and Fall and cited in the main text. For these and other examples, see Jeremy Black, ‘Gibbon and International Relations’, in Rosalind McKitterick
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116. 117. 118. 119.
John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment and Roland Quinault (eds), Edward Gibbon and Empire (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 217–46, esp. pp. 220–1. Robertson, ‘British Romantic Columbiads’, 2. Stafford, ‘Romantic Titanism’, p. 180. O’Neill, ‘Writing and History’, p. 153. On this point, see, e.g., Lenman, ‘“From Savage to Scot”’, pp. 205–6.
Chapter 4 1. See, e.g., Hume’s essay ‘Of the Balance of Trade’ (1787) and Smith’s Wealth of Nations. On the ‘cult of commerce’ in eighteenth-century Britain, see Colley, Britons: Forging a Nation, pp. 56–101. 2. Smith, Wealth of Nations, II, 35, 366–8. On political economy more generally, see Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and the essays in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 3. For an excellent summary of these issues, see Porter, Enlightenment, chapter 17, pp. 383–96. 4. For the other instalments, see Examiner, 28 December 1817, 817–19; and 4 January 1818, 1–2. 5. On the political implications of Keats’s floral and verdant imagery, see Roe, Culture of Dissent, chapter 4, pp. 111–33, esp. pp. 116–31; and Bewell, ‘Keats’s “Realm of Flora”’, pp. 71–100. 6. See also 4 January 1818, 2. 7. Porter, Enlightenment, p. 396. Philip Connell, Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 3. The phrase ‘condition of England’ derives from Carlyle’s Chartism (1839). 8. Hunt, The Feast of the Poets, p. 107. 9. On the composition of the poems, see PJK, pp. 304–5; and LJK, I, 223. Roe suggests that Keats was drawing on Hunt’s ‘Merry-Makings’ article when writing the poems, Culture of Dissent, p. 151. Hunt himself wrote four poems on Robin Hood, all of which were published in the Indicator for 15 and 20 November 1820. For the political associations of Robin Hood, see Roe, Culture of Dissent, pp. 140–55. On Robin Hood more generally, see Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 10. Hunt, Foliage, pp. 15–16. On this point, see John Barnard, ‘Keats’s “Robin Hood”, John Hamilton Reynolds, and the “Old Poets”’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 75 (1989), 196–7; and Roe, Culture of Dissent, pp. 140–2. For Keats’s familiarity with Foliage before its publication in February–March 1818, see LJK, I, 126–7. 11. Hoagwood, ‘Keats, Fictionality, and Finance’, p. 132. 12. For the composition histories of the poems, see PJK, pp. 326–7, 613–14. 13. On Isabella, see Kelvin Everest, ‘Isabella in the Market-place: Keats and Feminism’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 107–26; Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, pp. 54–63; and Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Keats’s Isabella and the “Digressions” of
Notes
14. 15. 16.
17. 18. 19.
20. 21.
22. 23.
24. 25. 26. 27.
28. 29.
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“Romance”’, Criticism, 27 (1985), 247–61. On Lamia, see Wolfson, Questioning Presence, p. 334; and Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, chapter 6, pp. 255–99. On money in Keats’s poetry more generally, see K. K. Ruthven, ‘Keats’s Dea Moneta’, Studies in Romanticism, 15 (1976), 445–59. On Keats’s personal finances, see Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, pp. 135–6. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 200. See, e.g., Examiner, 19 January 1817, 33–4; 16 February 1817, 97–8; 5 April 1818, 209–10; and 26 April 1818, 257–8. See Spadafora, The Idea of Progress, p. 15; and John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 66. See also 4 January 1818, 7–8; 1 March 1818, 129; and 3 May 1818, 273. Spadafora, The Idea of Progress, p. 16. See, e.g., The Idea of a Patriot King, in The Works of the Late Right Honourable Henry St. John Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, ed. David Mallet, 5 vols (London, 1754), III, 76. On civic tradition, see J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (London: Methuen, 1972), pp. 80–103, 104–47. See, e.g., Examiner, 15 March 1818, 171; and 23 February 1817, 113. Womersley, Transformation, p. 77. More generally, see Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); and Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). For the attitudes of English historians, see Spadafora, The Idea of Progress, pp. 213–53, esp. pp. 237–8. For Scottish historians, see ibid., pp. 253–320. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. Meek, D. Raphael and P. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), IV, 163. Cf. Smith’s attack in the Wealth of Nations on sumptuary laws and restrictions on the importation of foreign luxuries, I, 421. See also Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 152–73. Ferguson, Civil Society, p. 229. David Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’ and ‘Of Commerce’, in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, I, 299–307, 288–94. See, e.g., ibid., I, 307–8; and Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, new edn, 2 vols (1774; Edinburgh, 1813), I, 89, 324–5, 473, 509–12. See, e.g., Examiner, 14 February 1819, 97; and 10 August 1817, 498. On the ‘mannered repetition’ of lines 73–88 of the poem, see Everest, ‘Isabella in the Market-place’, p. 113. On the ‘narcissistic completeness’ of this relationship and the envy it inspires in Isabella’s brothers who represent a ‘gross parody’ of their closeness, see Martin Aske, ‘Keats, the Critics, and the Politics of Envy’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 46–64. Everest argues differently that the lovers’ intimacy represents a ‘wilfully self-blinding marginality to the wider range of human activity’, ‘Isabella in the Market-place’, p. 113. See R. S. White, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare (1948; repr. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), pp. 105, 162–6, 187–8. On the demise of natural beauty in England, see also Examiner, 5 April 1818,
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209–10; and 10 May 1818, 289–91. 30. Everest, ‘Isabella in the Market-place’, p. 116. 31. See, e.g., Examiner, 19 January 1817, 33; 28 December 1817, 818; 4 January 1818, 8; and 3 May 1818, 273. 32. Ibid., 23 March 1817, 180–1. See Sekora, Luxury, pp. 124–30. 33. The other instalments of this article are to be found in Examiner, 29 March 1818, 193–4; and 3 May 1818, 273–5. Mining also has satanic implications in Paradise Lost in I, 670–798. On Keats’s reading of and annotations to Paradise Lost, see The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Foreman, V, 291–305. More generally, see Beth Lau, Keats’s Paradise Lost (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998). 34. Newey, ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, p. 176. On the repressive rule of the East India Company in Ceylon, see Joan Baum, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: Slavery and the English Romantic Poets (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 117–18. 35. For Hunt’s use of the phrases ‘money-getting’ and ‘cunning’, see Examiner, 15 February 1818, 97; 28 December 1817, 818; 4 January 1818, 8; and 3 May 1818, 273. 36. Leigh Hunt, The Story of Rimini, A Poem (London, 1816), p. 111. On this point, see Roe, Culture of Dissent, pp. 119–20; and Newey, ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, pp. 168–9. 37. Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, p. 57. 38. For this argument, see ibid., pp. 58–9, where Watkins notes that the description of Isabella’s digging of Lorenzo’s grave is virtually a caricature of the relations of production described earlier in the poem. 39. See, e.g., Stillinger, The Hoodwinking of Madeline, p. 38. 40. Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, p. 141. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, pp. 198, 261. 41. For Keats’s reading of these texts, see Clarke, Recollections, pp. 123–4; LJK, I, 141, 237; and KC, I, 254–5. 42. See Phillips, Society and Sentiment, p. 147. Womersley denies that Gibbon had any such intention, Transformation, pp. 69–70. Cf. Lionel Grossman, The Empire Unposses’d: An Essay on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 32; and J. W. Johnson, The Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 238–9. 43. On these interpretive issues, see Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, p. 136; Bate, John Keats, pp. 547–61; and Wasserman, The Finer Tone, pp. 158–64. 44. As outlined by Sekora, Luxury, pp. 24–5. 45. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 223. 46. See, e.g., Examiner, 21 December 1817, 801. 47. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 262. 48. On Keats’s anti-authoritarianism, see Newey, ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, p. 179. See also Levinson on the ‘illegality’ of Hermes’ action, Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 265. 49. On Burton’s fable in The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1621), III, 2, i. I, see Bate, John Keats, pp. 543–7. On the parallels between Lamia and Milton’s Satan, see Wolfson, Questioning Presence, pp. 337–8 n. 4; and PJK, pp. 618, 619, 623.
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50. On this episode, see Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, pp. 137–43. 51. Lamia’s depiction was probably inspired by the description of the serpent in Paradise Lost, IX, 498–503 (marked by Keats in his copy), PJK, p. 618. 52. On Porphyro and the silk trade, see Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, pp. 76–7. On the connections between Porphyro and Lamia, see Wolfson, Questioning Presence, p. 337. Note also the references to purple dye in Isabella (e.g. 370), and the references to silk and dyes in the second part of Lamia (e.g. II, 197, 205). Gibbon, while not ‘insensible of the benefits of elegant luxury’, nonetheless notes its disruption of more useful contributions to society, Decline and Fall, IV, 79. 53. See also the comparable terms of Porphyro’s seduction of Madeline, Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, pp. 72–6. 54. On representations of luxury by Livy and the annalistic tradition, see Sekora, Luxury, pp. 36–9. See also Titus Livius, The History of Rome, trans. John Dujantius and John Freinstemius (London, 1686), pp. xxxix, 6. 55. See Marcus Cato, Fragments in Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta liberae rei publica, ed. H. Malcovati, 2nd edn (Turin: In aedibus Io. Bapt. Paraviae et sociorum, 1955), pp. 58–66, 154–75. Livy, The History of Rome, p. 893. Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, trans. John Dryden, 5 vols (London, 1683–6), vol. 2. 56. Sekora, Luxury, pp. 44–5. On the connection between snakes and women in the Western tradition, see de Almeida, Romantic Medicine, pp. 193–4. 57. On Lamia’s essential evil, see Evert, Aesthetic and Myth, pp. 271–5. On the ambiguity of her portrayal, see Bate, John Keats, pp. 554–60; Sperry, Keats the Poet, pp. 297–9; and Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, pp. 270–2. On the shifts of sympathy from Lamia to Lycius, see Wolfson, Questioning Presence, pp. 338–40. 58. For the allusions to Scott and Weber, see PJK, p. 639. Gittings notes that in lines II, 125–30 Keats was reproducing the frontispiece of his edition of Robertson’s History of America, The Living Year, p. 172. 59. René Aubert d’Aubeuf de Vertot, An History of the Revolutions that Happened in the Government of the Roman Republic, 3rd edn (1719; London, 1774), pp. 8, 10–11. 60. Similarly, in Volney’s Ruins the eastern world is undone by the effeminate luxury of the pasha, p. 95; and Vertot also describes the effeminacy of luxury, Roman Revolutions, pp. 11, 13. 61. Wolfson, Questioning Presence, p. 335. On Corinth’s reputation as a city of lust and prostitution, see Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, pp. 259, 273. On Lamia and envy more generally, see Aske, ‘The Politics of Envy’, pp. 57–8. 62. On this point, see Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, p. 145. 63. On Burton, see PJK, pp. 632–3. Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary, trans. Pierre Bayle, 4 vols (1697; London, 1710), I, 296–9. 64. Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, p. 135. 65. The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett, 3rd edn, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892), III, 107–9, 109–10, 255–6. 66. Sekora, Luxury, p. 29. 67. Levinson reads this somewhat differently: Lycius’s erotic idyll and Apollonius’s material idealism are the two sides of Lamia; in other words, she is a reconciliation of the Platonic and Aristotelian systems, Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 272.
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68. De Almeida, Romantic Medicine, p. 191, who sees Lamia as a victim of the sophist’s guile. 69. Donald Livingston, ‘Hume on the Natural History of Philosophical Consciousness’, in Peter Jones (ed.), The ‘Science of Man’ in the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Reid and their Contemporaries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), p. 75. 70. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, p. 297, and ‘The Sceptic’, in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (1758; Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1985), p. 161. See also Woodhouse’s references to Apollonius in his September 1819 letter to Taylor: ‘He is a Magician’, LJK, II, 164. 71. Cf. Bernard Blackstone, The Consecrated Urn: An Interpretation of Keats in Terms of Growth and Form (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1951), p. 75. 72. Hume, ‘The Sceptic’, p. 159. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (1739–40; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), hereafter cited in the main text. On fanaticism and enthusiasm, see also Dictionnaire philosophique, Œuvres complètes, 19, 73; 20, 196. 73. Livingston, ‘Hume on Philosophical Consciousness’, p. 75. 74. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 266. On Apollonius as ‘Keats’s most forbidding portrait of ressentiment’, see Aske, ‘The Politics of Envy’, pp. 57, 59–60. 75. Keats’s argument is echoed in Shelley’s Defence of Poetry when he argues that ‘the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure’. All references to A Defence of Poetry are to Peacock’s Four Ages of Poetry, Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, Browning’s Essay on Shelley, ed. H. F. B. BrettSmith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1921), pp. 23–59, and will hereafter appear in the main text. 76. Aske, ‘The Politics of Envy’, p. 57.
Chapter 5 1. Kucich, ‘Keats’s Literary Tradition’, p. 253. 2. Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, p. 163. On the dream framework, see Hoagwood, ‘Keats, Fictionality, and Finance’, p. 136. On the influence of Dante’s Purgatorio, see Muir, ‘The Meaning of Hyperion’, p. 111. 3. See Cox, Poetry and Politics, pp. 197, 194–6. 4. Wolfson, Questioning Presence, p. 261. 5. See, e.g., Dickstein, ‘Keats and Politics’, 180; and Jones, Adam’s Dream, p. 181. Cf. O’Neill’s argument that The Fall, however subjective, is marked by a distance from the events in question, ‘Writing and History’, p. 154. 6. Ibid., p. 156. 7. On the limitations of spectatorship, see Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 11–12. 8. On the commercial success and positive reception of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, see Unger, ‘The Resurgence of Smithian Scholarship’, 491, 493. 9. Chandler, England in 1819, pp. 229–30. 10. Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense, pp. 125–38. On Bailey, see Earl Wasserman, ‘Keats and Benjamin Bailey on the Imagination’, Modern Language
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Note, 68 (1953), 361–5. 11. See, e.g., John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1690), book II, ch. II, pp. 45–6; and David Hartley, Observations on Man (London, 1749), part I, ch. III, sec. v, pp. 383–9. Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, pp. 362–410. 12. See Observations on Man, part I, ch. I, secs i–iii, pp. 5–114. 13. On this point, see Mee, Selected Letters, p. 381 n. 35. 14. On the influence of The Theory of Moral Sentiments on the ‘Revolution debate’ and the work of Wollstonecraft, Mackintosh, Godwin and Hazlitt, see Emma Rothschild, ‘Adam Smith and Conservative Economics’, The Economic History Review, 45 (1992), 75–6. 15. For this argument, see Henry C. Clark, ‘Conversation and Moderate Virtue in Adam Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments”’, The Review of Politics, 54 (1992), 205; and Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 74–111. Cf. Cobbett’s association of Smith with a Mandevillean view of society, discussed in Connell, Romanticism, Economics, and the Question of ‘Culture’, p. 208. 16. This argument is similar to Lord Kames’s ‘ideal presence’ which suggests that fictions as well as truths have the ability to move the emotions, but that representations can not have this effect unless they contain a degree of intensity, Elements of Criticism, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1762), I, 104–8, 106, 108, 112. 17. Mee, Selected Letters, p. 381 n. 36. For a Platonic reading, see, e.g., Stillinger, The Hoodwinking of Madeline, p. 155. 18. See Mee, Selected Letters, p. 391 n. 66. On the third axiom, see ibid. 19. Some influential theories of beauty in the period, such as Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principle of Taste (1790), emphasised that beauty was not inherent to an object, but was rather the result of the operation of the mind. On ‘psychological’ approaches to art, see Martin Kallich, The Association of Ideas and Critical Theory in Eighteenth-Century England: A History of Psychological Method in English Criticism (The Hague: Mouton, 1970). 20. Cf. Andrés Rodríguez, Book of the Heart: The Poetics, Letters, and Life of John Keats (New York: Steiner Books, 1993), p. 88, who argues that by ‘great Works’ Keats does not mean books but the works of nature. However, Keats’s primary point is to distinguish between imaginative and instructive reading. 21. Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 67. 22. On Wordsworth’s ‘wise passiveness’, see LJK, I, 232 n. 4. For a detailed discussion of negative capability, see, e.g., Walter Jackson Bate, Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939). 23. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou de l’éducation, 4 vols (Amsterdam, 1762), II, 76, 78–80. For a discussion of ‘negative education’, see Émile, or Treatise on Education, trans. William H. Payne (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), pp. 161–4. For Keats’s copies of Émile and the Conduct, see KC, I, 255, 259. 24. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (London, 1693), sec. 140, pp. 174, 175; and sec. 157, p. 211. John Locke, Some Thoughts on the
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25.
26. 27.
28.
29.
30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.
39. 40.
41. 42. 43. 44.
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Conduct of the Understanding in the Search of Truth (1706; London, 1741), sec. 19, p. 50; sec. 23, pp. 51, 61, 62, 64–5; sec. 12, p. 36. Ibid. See also sec. 4, p. 16 for Locke’s comments on memory, practice and habits, which clarify Keats’s reflection on the dulling of original minds by custom; and sec. 21, pp. 54–66 for Locke’s ideas on bias, universality and partiality, which are similar to Keats’s comments on intellectual bias and the relationship between different departments of knowledge in LJK, I, 277. On this point, see Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism, p. 62. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, in The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Professor Shedd, 7 vols (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1868), III, 176, 364. Keats later took a walk with Coleridge in April 1819 and even discussed with him the idea of the ‘second consciousness’, LJK, II, 88–9. On this point and the possible influence of Locke’s ideas on passive and active power on Keats’s letter, see Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, pp. 33–4; and de Almeida, Romantic Medicine, pp. 288–9. Keats’s argument is similar to Voltaire’s in Dictionnaire philosophique: ‘Nous sommes gouvernés par l’instinct, comme les chats et les chèvres. C’est encore une ressemblance que nous avons avec les animaux: ressemblance aussi incontestable que celle de notre sang, de nos besoins, des fonctions de notre corps’, Œuvres complètes, 19, 489. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, pp. 213–14. Halliford, VIII, 5, 5–6, 18, 19, 21, 23. Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique, p. 65. On this point, see Hoagwood, ‘Keats, Fictionality, and Finance’, pp. 134–5. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 57. On moral education, see Clark, ‘Conversation and Moderate Virtue’, 187. Hoagwood, ‘Keats, Fictionality, and Finance’, p. 136. See, e.g, David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, II, 363. For an overview of these various arguments, see Brumfitt, La Philosophie, p. 48. Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique, p. 69. On this point, see David Passmore, ‘Enthusiasm, Fanaticism and David Hume’, in Peter Jones (ed.), The ‘Science of Man’ in the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Reid and their Contemporaries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), p. 95. On this point, see T. D. Campbell, Adam Smith’s Science of Morals (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971), pp. 19–21. Clarke, ‘Conversation and Moderate Virtue’, 191. For the argument in relation to Hutcheson, see also A. L. Macfie, The Individual in Society (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967), pp. 83–4. John. W. Darnford, ‘Adam Smith, Equality, and the Wealth of Sympathy’, American Journal of Political Science, 24 (1980), 686. See, e.g, Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, p. 214; and Muir, ‘The Meaning of Hyperion’, p. 111. Kucich, ‘Keats’s Literary Tradition’, p. 257. Hoagwood, ‘Keats, Fictionality, and Finance’, p. 137. Muir, ‘The Meaning of Hyperion’, pp. 294 n. 2, 113. Evert, Aesthetic and Myth, p. 294. See also O’Neill, ‘Writing and History’, p. 163, who argues that
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Moneta represents a ‘beneficent’ and ‘mothering’ poetic tradition. 45. Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense, p. 273. 46. For a discussion of Keats’s gendering of negative capability, see Watkins, Politics of the Imagination, pp. 78–82. 47. Evert, Aesthetic and Myth, pp. 290–1. 48. O’Neill, ‘Writing and History’, p. 156. 49. On salvific narratives in Wordsworth’s poetry, see Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p. 119. 50. Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense, p. 117. 51. Ibid., pp. 198–9. On this passage and on Keats’s ‘posture of “enlightenment”’, see Chandler, England in 1819, p. 422. 52. Sperry, ‘Keats’s Skepticism’, 86. On Hunt and religion, see Timothy Webb, ‘Religion of the Heart: Leigh Hunt’s Unpublished Tribute to Shelley’, KeatsShelley Review, 7 (1992), 1–61. 53. Ryan, Keats: The Religious Sense, p. 208. 54. Hoagwood, ‘Keats, Fictionality, and Finance’, p. 138. See also O’Neill, ‘Writing and History’, p. 155; and Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory, pp. 215, 217. 55. This point is made in ibid., p. 149. 56. For these arguments, see Muir, ‘The Meaning of Hyperion’, pp. 114–19. On the poem’s new ‘hermeneutics of earthly reference’, see also Hoagwood, ‘Keats, Fictionality, and Finance’, pp. 139–40. 57. Muir, ‘The Meaning of Hyperion’, p. 119. 58. Chandler, England in 1819, pp. 188, 504. 59. On Plato, see Tracy Ware, ‘Shelley’s Platonism in A Defence of Poetry’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 23 (1983), 549–66. 60. Shelley rejects the distinction between poets and philosophers, but nonetheless is hostile to the French philosophes and British Enlightenment thinkers, Defence, p. 51. 61. On this point, see Unger, ‘The Resurgence of Smithian Scholarship’, 498. 62. Herbert F. Thomson, ‘Adam Smith’s Philosophy of Science’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 79 (1965), 217. 63. Ibid. 64. On the more positive view of utility in A Philosophical View of Reform, see Connell, Romanticism, Economics, and the Question of ‘Culture’, pp. 219–20. 65. Chandler, England in 1819, p. 541. Ware, ‘Shelley’s Platonism’, 558. Shelley also uses the mirror trope in relation to his argument about the nature of sympathetic identification in tragedy, in which he represents sympathy as a process of recognition, Defence, p. 37. 66. Stillinger, The Hoodwinking of Madeline, pp. 63–4. 67. Connell, Romanticism, Economics, and the Question of ‘Culture’, p. 225. 68. On this point, see Passmore, ‘Enthusiasm’, pp. 95–7. Woodhouse compared Keats’s ‘cameleon’ poet to a mad man: ‘This in excess is the Case <with> mad persons’, LJK, I, 390. 69. Butler rightly sees The Fall as a rejection of the solipsism of Wordsworth’s Wanderer in books one and four of The Excursion, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, p. 152. 70. Hoagwood, ‘Keats, Fictionality, and Finance’, p. 136.
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Afterword 1. Grob, ‘Noumenal Influences’, p. 292. 2. Martin Aske, Keats and Hellenism: An Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 108. 3. Chandler, England in 1819, p. 424. 4. Stillinger The Hoodwinking of Madeline, p. 105. 5. On Hartley’s ‘doctrine of vibrations’, see Observations on Man, part I, ch. I, secs i–iii, pp. 5–114. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book II, ch. XXIX. For the argument that Locke does not uncritically invest in his metaphors of sight, see Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy, pp. 81–5. 6. On this point, see Chandler, England in 1819, pp. 413–14. 7. Grob, ‘Noumenal Influences’, p. 295. Stillinger, The Hoodwinking of Madeline, p. 156. Helen Vender, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 47. For a detailed overview of critical responses to Lockean empiricism and its centrality to scholarly conceptions of British Romanticism, see Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy, pp. 3–28. 8. For a discussion of the literary associations of the landscapes, see Wolfson, Questioning Presence, pp. 309, 310–11. 9. The Tatler and Spectator articles are reprinted in John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis (eds), The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620– 1820 (London: Paul Elek, 1975), pp. 143–5. 10. Phillips, Society and Sentiment, pp. 221–3. 11. On the importance of association to the English landscape movement, see H. F. Clarke, ‘Eighteenth-Century Elysiums. The Role of “Association” in the Landscape Movement’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 6 (1943), 165–89. 12. Aske, Keats and Hellenism, p. 116. 13. Vender, The Odes of John Keats, p. 49. John Jones, John Keats’s Dream of Truth (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), p. 222. Bromwich, Hazlitt: Mind of a Critic, pp. 392, 398. 14. Wolfson, Questioning Presence, p. 308.
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Index
Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism, 160n.6 Addison, Joseph, 156 Adonais (Shelley), 9 Aesthetic and Myth (Evert), 163n.48 aesthetics, 124–7 Alastor (Shelley), 49 Alexander III, of Macedon, 20, 43 Alfred, King, 21, 28, 31, 33 Alison, Archibald Essays on the Nature and Principle of Taste, 187n.19 Allott, Miriam, 57 Almeida, Hermione de, 13, 85 Critical Essays on John Keats, 10–11 John Keats and Romantic Medicine, 179n.59 America, 67 British fears about, 70–2 colonisation of, 24, 68, 94–6, 108 discovery of, 24, 68, 86–7 emigration to, 66, 70–1 and Fearon’s Sketches of America, 70–1 Keats’s letters to, 65, 66, 71–2, 73 literary backwardness of, 71–2, 176n.25 North, 68, 70–1, 95–6 South, 24, 68, 69–70, 77, 84, 86, 87 see also emigration; empire; New World; Robertson (William); Voltaire American Indians see Native Americans American revolution, 71, 79 Anatomy of Melancholy, The (Burton), 113 ancient/modern debate, 17–18 Anne, Queen, 29 anthropology, 3, 12, 13, 15, 63, 66, 72, 76, 79, 83, 134, 154, 158
anti-Americanism, 71 see also America antiquarianism, 55 Antiquary, The (Scott), 170n.20 Antiquité dévoilée par ses usages, L’ (Boulanger), 134 Apollonius, of Tyana, 116–17 Arabian Nights, The (Scott), 115 Aristotle, 117 Arthur, King, 40 asceticism, 116, 118, 120, 125 Aske, Martin, 120, 157 associationism, 124–7, 151, 152, 154, 156–7 atonement, 140 Augustan period, 3 Augustan poets, 28–9, 31, 32, 38 Augustus, Gaius Julius Caesar, 21, 83, 93–4 Aztecs see Native Americans Bacon, Francis, 13 The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Moral, 166n.30 Bailey, Benjamin, 11, 19, 82, 87, 124, 126, 127, 131 ‘An Essay on the Moral Principle’, 50, 123 Baillie, Joanna, 2 ballads, 58, 98 barbarism, 24, 26, 36, 64, 68, 73, 94, 95, 96, 134, 135, 140 Barnard, John, 47, 167n.38 Bate, Walter Jackson, 8 Bayle, Pierre Dictionnaire historique et critique, 116 beauty see Hutcheson; Keats (John); Shelley; Smith Bentham, Jeremy, 120, 148
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Berkeley, George, Bishop of Cloyne, 146, 155 Bewell, Alan, 2 Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), 131 biography, 21, 44, 46 Birkbeck, Morris and Columbus, 86 and George Keats, 66 Letters from Illinois, 66, 70 Notes on a Journey in America, 70 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 11, 37 Blair, Hugh, 1, 2, 28, 151 A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, 1, 90, 91, 153 on language theory, 90–1, 133 Lectures on Rhetoric, 27, 90, 91, 164n.3 on literary history, 1–2, 27 on poetic evolution, 1, 91 blasphemy trials, 26, 32 Blenheim, Battle of, 83, 93 Bloom, Harold, 28, 42 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 106 Boileau, Nicholas–Despréaux, 31, 34 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, 1st Viscount The Idea of a Patriot King, 25, 102 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 75, 80, 86, 96, 140, 179n.74 Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne, 80 Boulanger, Nicolas Antoine L’Antiquité dévoilée par ses usages, 134 Brawne, Fanny, 60 Briggs, H. E., 77, 78 Bromwich, David, 124 Brown, Charles Armitage, 11 Brown, Marshall, 6, 8 Brumfitt, J. H., 68 Brutus, 21 Buffon, Georges Louis le Clerc, Comte de on climatic determinism, 76 on degeneracy theories, 77 on geographic upheaval, 84 Histoire naturelle, 76 Keats’s reading of, 76, 151 on origins theories, 76 Burke, Edmund, 31 Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop of Salisbury, 11 Burns, Robert, 98, 177n.41 Burton, Robert, 114, 116 The Anatomy of Melancholy, 113 Butler, Marilyn, 9, 116 Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, 190n.69 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron, 2, 10,
33, 34, 46, 123 The Corsair, 36 Manfred, 170n.15 Caesar, Gaius Julius, 21 Caleb Williams (Godwin), 43 Calidore: A Fragment (Keats), 39, 41, 42 Calvinism, 141 Campbell, Thomas, 37 Canterbury Tales, The (‘Knight’s Tale’) (Chaucer), 105–6 Carlile, Richard, 26 The Deist, 165–6n.21 see also blasphemy trials; Keats (John) Carlyle, Thomas Chartism, 182n.7 Cartwright, John, Major, 9 Casas, Bartolomé de las, 94 catastrophism, 84 Catholic Church, the, 60–1, 135 Cato, Marcus, 114 Caudwell, Christopher, 10 causality, 21, 24, 26, 88, 142–3 Celtic Researches (Davies), 166n.26 Celts, the, 76, 177n.41 Cenci, The (Shelley), 122 Ceylon, 108 Chandler, James, 2, 6, 8, 9, 20, 57, 63, 71, 72, 95, 123, 143, 147, 154 England in 1819, 176n.25 Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (Hazlitt), 37, 105, 168n.49 Charles I, 93–4 Charles II, 31, 39 Chartism (Carlyle), 182n.7 Chatterton, Thomas, 30 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 17, 18, 30, 44 The Canterbury Tales (‘Knight’s Tale’), 105–6 Troilus and Cressida, 105 Chinese, the, 77 Citizen of the World, The (Goldsmith), 77 chivalry, 30, 39–41, 45, 47, 58, 60 Christianisme dévoilé, Le (Holbach), 22, 165–6n.21 Christianity, 4, 22, 47, 113, 114, 116, 134, 138, 140–2, 155 ‘Christmas and Other National MerryMakings’ (Hunt), 98, 109, 112, 119–20 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 11, 111 civic virtue, 12, 97–8, 102, 103 civil society, 12, 15, 19, 23, 47, 56, 57, 64 climate, theories of, 76–7
Index see also Buffon; Montesquieu; Pauw; Robertson (William); Voltaire Cobbett, William, 101 Cockney School, 9, 11, 27, 32, 37, 49 Colden, Cadwallader History of the Five Indian Nations, 90 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 13, 33, 34, 142 Biographia Literaria, 131 on genius, 131 on the imagination, 131, 188n.27 on mechanism, 4 Colley, Linda, 31 Columbus, Christopher, 68, 79, 83, 86–7, 96 commerce, 97, 102–3, 106, 110, 115, 152, 153 commercialism, 5, 15, 71–2, 97–9, 100–4, 105–6, 106–10, 113, 115–6, 120, 153–4 common sense, philosophy of, 123–4, 131, 146 Commonwealth of Oceana, The (Harrington), 101 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot, Abbé de, 80 ‘Condition of England’, debate on, 98, 99, 100–4, 107–8, 182n.7 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de, 1, 72 Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, 133–4, 135 Congreve, William, 37 Connell, Philip, 148 constitutional reform see reform Corsair, The (Byron), 36 Cortez, Hernando, 95 cosmopolitanism, 4 Cowden Clarke, Charles, 20, 21, 25 commonplace book, 167n.38 Recollections of Writers, 11 Cox, Jeffrey, 27, 32, 122 Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, A (Blair), 1, 90, 91, 153 Critical Essays on John Keats (Almeida), 10–11 Croker, John Wilson, 37 Cromwell, Oliver, 20 crusades, the, 24, 39–41 Cuvier, Georges An Essay on the Theory of the Earth, 84 see also catastrophism Darnford, John, 136
209
Darnton, Robert, 4 Darwin, Erasmus, 177n.33 Davies, Edmund Celtic Researches, 166n.26 de Almeida see Almeida De l’Esprit (Helvétius), 125 De l’Esprit des lois (Montesquieu), 76–7, 84 de Pauw see Pauw declension, 79 decline, theories of, 79, 100–1, 102–3, 110, 112, 114–15 see also history (pessimistic) Decline and Fall, The (Gibbon), 65, 67, 75, 79, 83, 93–4, 95, 101, 103, 111, 113, 185n.52 Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance, The (Paine), 101 Defence of Poetry, A (Shelley), 122, 123, 143–7, 149, 150, 186n.75, 189n.60 Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe, 129 degeneracy, 77–8, 153 deism, 13, 20, 22, 47, 134, 141–2 Deist, The (Carlile and Holbach), 165–6n.21 Della Cruscans, 39 Dictionnaire historique et critique (Bayle), 116 Dictionnaire philosophique (Voltaire), 15, 22, 24, 25, 26, 104, 119, 155, 167n.39, 181n.112, 188n.29 Diderot, Denis, 134–5 Le Neveu de Rameau, 76 Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, 76 Dilke, Charles, 46, 71, 147 dissent, 15 D’Holbach see Holbach Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity, The (Priestley), 74 Domingo, 87, 95 dreams, 56, 60, 61–2, 131, 149–50, 154 see also Keats (John) Dryden, John, 17, 31 Du Toit, Alexander, 94 Eden, 111–12 Edinburgh Review, 29, 36, 38, 58 education see pedagogy Egyptians, the, 76, 80–1, 177n.41 Elements of Criticism (Kames), 187n.16 Elgin marbles, 80, 157 Elizabeth I, 30
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Elizabethan period, 30, 58 Elizabethans, the, 18–19, 22, 26, 29 emigration, 66, 70–1 empire British, 80, 108 Gibbon, 75 Napoleonic, 80 Portuguese, 86 Roman, 23, 59, 75, 103, 111, 113–14 Spanish, 68, 69–70, 73, 86–7, 94–6, 108 empiricism, 4, 5, 12, 13, 24, 129, 140, 151, 154, 155, 158 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2, 45 Endymion (Keats), 3, 14, 15, 19, 27, 42, 46, 47–56, 57, 63–4, 123, 132, 141, 152 England in 1819 (Chandler), 176n.25 Enlightenment, the American, 3, 5 and Christianity, 4 and cosmopolitanism, 4 and Counter–Enlightenment, 4 definitions of, 3–7, 13, 164n.57 elitism of, 5 English, 4, 5, 13, 103, 151 French, 2, 3, 4, 13, 56, 66, 75, 76, 80, 83, 103, 151 historians, 24–5, 95, 121 and the Middle Ages, 59–60 philosophers, 123–4 and progress, 5 and reason, 4, 6 and Romanticism, 4–8 Scottish, 2, 3, 5, 13, 31, 50, 54, 56, 66, 67, 68, 72, 75, 76, 83, 103, 133, 143, 151, 153 and wealth-creation, 97, 98, 103–4, 120 see also deism; glottogenesis; history; Keats (John); moral philosophy; Romanticism; utility Enquirer, The (Godwin), 170n.22, 171n.23 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, An (Hume), 25, 166–7n.34 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, An (Godwin), 44, 74 Enquiry Concerning the Principle of Morals, An (Hume), 117 enthusiasm, 134 epic, 17, 19, 35, 82, 88, 89, 90, 96, 122 epistemology, historical, 9
Erasmus, of Rotterdam The Praise of Folly, 173n.62 eschatology, 142 Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (Condorcet), 133–4, 135 Essai sur les mœurs (Voltaire), 21, 23–4, 25–6, 65, 66, 68, 73–4, 75, 83, 95, 135, 176n.28 ‘Essay on Chivalry’ (Scott), 45 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke), 124, 130, 155 Essay on the History of Civil Society, An (Ferguson), 51, 103, 153, 175n.10 ‘Essay on the Moral Principle, An’ (Bailey), 50, 123 Essay on the Principle of Population, An (Malthus), 99 Essay on the Principles of Human Action, An (Hazlitt), 44, 50, 61, 92, 124–7 ‘Essay on Romance’ (Scott), 2, 45 Essay on the Theory of the Earth, An (Cuvier), 84 Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, An (Warton), 28 Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Moral, The (Bacon), 166n.30 Essays Moral, Political and Literary (Hume), 104, 118 Essays on the Nature and Principle of Taste (Alison), 187n.19 Eve of St. Agnes, The (Keats), 14, 15, 41, 47, 56–64, 109, 110, 113, 152, 154 Eve of St. Mark, The (Keats), 60 Evert, Walter, 8, 13, 138 Aesthetic and Myth, 163n.48 evocation see history (evocation of) evolution, 2, 68, 74, 79, 153 Examiner, 72, 100–4, 106–8, 116, 148–9 on atonement, 140 on British patriots, 33 on chivalry, 40 on colonisation, 69–71, 108 on commerce, 15, 100–4 on commercialism, 97–8, 99, 100–4, 106–7, 116 on decline, 32, 100–4 and dissent, 15, 32–3 Keats’s reading of, 176n.20 on liberty, 32–3 on luxury, 15, 40, 110, 116 on money–getting, 40, 100–4, 106–7 motto of, 26 on North America, 70–1
Index on parliamentary reform, 32 on poets, 148–9 on public spirit, 33 on sociability, 98, 108, 109 on South America, 69–71 on tradition, 97–8, 112 and ‘Young Poets’ article, 39 see also commercialism; Hunt (Leigh) Excursion, The (Wordsworth), 149, 190n.69 Expostulation and Reply (Wordsworth), 129 factory conditions, 107–8 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser), 41, 42, 52 Fairer, David, 18 Fairfax, Edward, 28 Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, The (Keats), 3, 14, 15, 35, 64, 65, 66, 96, 89, 109, 112, 121–50, 151, 153 fanaticism, 15, 20, 24, 40, 73, 109, 121, 132–3, 134, 135–6, 140, 148, 149, 181n.112 fatalism, 78, 88 Fearon, Henry Bradshaw, 72 Sketches of America, 70 Feast of the Poets, The (Hunt), 28, 33–4, 98 Ferdinand VII, 69, 70 Ferguson, Adam, 50 An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 51, 103, 153, 175n.10 feudalism, 12, 13, 15, 22–4, 47–8, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 63, 64, 69, 83–4, 104, 152, 166n.26 figurality, 134, 139, 142, 149 Florence, 106 Foliage (Hunt), 28, 99 Forbes, Duncan, 24 Ford, John, 29 Four Ages of Poetry, The (Peacock), 36, 84, 133, 143 France, 30, 31, 100 Franklin, Benjamin, 71, 72 French Enlightenment see Enlightenment French revolution, 4, 25, 31, 40 French School, 28, 29–31, 39, 164n.5, 168n.47 friendship, 49, 50–1, 52–3, 56, 64 Fry, Paul H., 9 Galt, John, 2 gardens see landscape gardens, 156 Gay, Peter, 24
211
gender, 61 and civility, 138–9 and ‘negative capability’, 139 geographic upheaval, 84–5 see also catastrophism German School, 34 Gibbon, Edward, 7, 28 on chivalry/the crusades, 40 The Decline and Fall, 65, 67, 75, 79, 83, 93–4, 95, 101, 103, 111, 113, 185n.52 on empire, 75 on feudalism, 47, 60, 152 Keats’s reading of, 11, 12, 13, 65, 124, 151 on luxury, 103, 113 sentimentalism of, 5, 7, 92, 93–4 on the silk trade, 113, 185n.52 Gifford, William, 92 Gilpin, William Observations on the River Wye, 59 see also picturesque glottogenesis, 89–91, 133–4, 144 Godwin, William, 2, 13, 142 Caleb Williams, 43 The Enquirer, 170n.22, 171n.23 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 44, 74 and Hazlitt, 43–4 on historical evocation, 44–5 and Keats, 7, 46, 71–2 Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 44, 45, 46 ‘Of History and Romance’, 44–5 on perfectibility, 71–2, 74 on philosophic history, 44–5 on rationalism, 147 St. Leon, 43, 49 sentimentalism of, 44–5 see also millennianism; perfectibility; rationalism Goldsmith, Oliver, 151 The Citizen of the World, 77 A History of the Earth, 77 gothic, 18, 30 Gower, John, 17 Gray, Thomas, 28 The Progress of Poesy, 28 Grob, Alan, 154, 155 Guy Mannering (Scott), 170n.20, 173n.55 Habeas Corpus Act, 32 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 105 Harrington, James The Commonwealth of Oceana, 101
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Hartley, David, 124, 131, 151, 155 Observations on Man, 125 Hazlitt, William, 2, 38, 110, 120, 123 on asceticism, 125 on associationism, 124–5 on beauty, 127, 157 Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, 37, 105, 168n.49 on climatic determinism, 77 on ‘disinterestedness’, 82, 125, 131 Essay on the Principles of Human Action, 44, 50, 61, 92, 124–7 on the French School, 28–30 on Gibbon, 65 on Godwin, 43–4, 46 on the imagination, 43, 92, 125, 126–7, 131 and Keats, 3, 11, 105, 165n.9 ‘Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth’, 2, 29–30, 165n.9 Lectures on the English Comic Writers, 168n.49 Lectures on the English Poets, 2, 18, 29–30, 36, 92, 98, 105–6, 143 A Letter to William Gifford, 92 Mandeville, 170n.20 on mechanism, 124–5 on moral philosophy, 92, 123, 125–6 on the national school, of poetry, 29–30, 34, 105–6 ‘On Burns and the Old English Ballads’, 98 ‘On Chaucer and Spenser’, 105–6 ‘On Dreams’, 61, 62, 131 ‘On the English Novelists’, 43, 46 ‘On Imitation’, 124, 127 ‘On the Living Poets’, 36 ‘On Manner’, 77 ‘On Milton’s Versification’, 28–9 ‘On Poetry in General’, 92, 143, 157–8 ‘On the Tendency of Sects’, 26, 119 The Plain Speaker, 61 on power, 92 primitivism of, 18, 36 A Reply to Malthus, 101 The Round Table, 77, 119 on Scott, 43–4 on sculpture, 92, 143, 157–8 on sectarianism, 119 The Spirit of the Age, 20, 21, 22 on sympathetic identification, 43–4, 92 on Voltaire, 65 ‘Why the Arts are not Progressive’, 18 on Wordsworth, 98
Heart of Midlothian, The (Scott), 170n.20 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 152 Helvétius, Claude Adrien De l’Esprit, 125 Herodotus, of Halicarnassus, 117 Hesiod, 117 Highlanders, 135 Hilson, J. C., 91–2 Histoire naturelle (Buffon), 76 Historical Account of the Most Celebrated Voyages, The (Mavor), 86, 87, 95 historicism, 6, 9, 10, 75, 92, 152 see also New Historicism historiography, 3, 5, 9, 10, 17, 18, 27–8, 39, 57, 64, 65, 67, 91–2, 96, 143, 151 history annalistic, 113–14 classical, 18, 20, 23, 27, 43, 103, 151 comparative, 67, 141, 151 conjectural, 13, 66, 67, 133 contrariety models of, 23, 25, 32, 36, 151, 153 cyclical, 14, 15, 23, 32, 36, 79,102, 103, 152 developmental models of, 13, 15, 22–3, 42, 53–6, 57, 63–4, 72–5, 151, 152 evocation of, 15, 44–5, 57–60, 63–4, 152 exemplary, 20, 21, 151 hypothetical see conjectural intellectual, 9 linear, 14, 67, 75 literary, 1–2, 9, 12, 14, 17–22, 26–7, 27–32, 35–8, 54, 154–5 material approaches to, 9, 10 meta-narratives of, 4, 5 narrative, 5, 68 natural, 134–5 pessimistic, 74, 99, 100–4, 140–1 philosophic, 5, 13, 20, 24–5, 42, 43, 44–5, 151 progressive, 4, 5, 13, 18, 22–3, 25–6, 32, 54–5, 63–4, 66, 67–8, 72–3, 75, 95–6, 121, 133–4 religious, 134–5, 141–2 representative, 20–21 revisionary, 75, 92, 95–6, 121 sentimental, 42–3, 46–7, 57–8, 64, 91–2, 143 stadial, 5, 7, 13, 14, 15, 66, 67–8, 72, 75, 94, 121, 133, 143, 151 universal, 4, 5
Index Whig, 33 see also historicism; historiography; natural philosophy History of America, The (Robertson), 7, 54, 65–6, 68, 69, 73, 75–7, 79, 81–4, 86–7, 93, 94, 95–6, 108, 135 History of Charles V, The (Robertson), 21, 22–3, 25, 40, 59, 103, 106, 111, 113, 115 History of the Earth, A (Goldsmith), 77 History of England, The (Hume), 20, 21, 94, 135 History of English Poetry, The (Warton), 12, 17–18, 27, 29, 30, 40, 45 History of the Five Indian Nations (Colden), 90 History of [North] America, The (Robertson), 66, 68, 95–6 History of Rome, The (Livy), 113, 114 History of Scotland, The (Robertson), 22, 59, 94, 135 Hoagwood, Terence, 133, 134, 149 Hobbes, Thomas, 50 Hogg, James, 2 Holbach, Paul Henry Thiry, Baron d’, 47 Le Christianisme dévoilé, 22, 165–6n.21 see also Carlile; Deist, The Holinshed, Raphael, 11 Home, Henry, Lord Kames, 2, 50, 67, 68, 123, 133 Elements of Criticism, 187n.16 Sketches of the History of Man, 183n.24 Hoodwinking of Madeline, The (Stillinger), 163n.46 Hooke, Nathaniel The Roman History, 111 Huguenots, 73 human understanding, theories of, 4, 5, 15, 44, 61–2, 124–32, 154 humanism, 8, 14, 20, 41–2, 97, 121, 142–3, 147–8, 169n.61 Hume, David, 47, 50, 104, 121, 151 on chivalry/the crusades, 40 empiricism of, 24–5 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 25, 166–7n.34 An Enquiry Concerning the Principle of Morals, 117 Essays Moral, Political and Literary, 104, 117–18 on fanaticism, 135 on feudalism, 47, 60, 152
213
on fiction, 148 The History of England, 20, 21, 94, 135 on human understanding, 123, 124, 155 on literary history, 28, 38 on luxury, 104 moral philosophy, 123 The Natural History of Religion, 1, 134, 148 on philosophy, 117–18, 119 on religion, 134 ‘The Sceptic’, 117–18 sentimentalism of, 92, 94 A Treatise of Human Nature, 118, 148 Hungerford, E. B., 13 Hunt, Henry, 26 Hunt, James Henry Leigh, 38, 120 on America, 69–72 on the Augustan poets, 28 and chivalry, 39–40 ‘Christmas and Other National MerryMakings’, 98, 109, 112, 119–20, 182n.9 on commercialism, 99, 110 on contemporary poets, 33–4, 98 coterie of, 27 deism of, 22, 140 The Feast of the Poets, 28, 33–4, 98 Foliage, 28, 99 on the French School, 28, 30, 34, 39, 168n.47 on the German School, 34 Indicator, 182n.9 and Keats, 3, 9, 18–19, 32, 39–40, 88 on moral philosophy, 99 on the national school, of poetry, 28, 34, 98, 105–6 The Religion of the Heart, 141 ‘Robin Hood’ poems, 182n.9 ‘Round Table’, 40 sociability of, 39, 49, 98–9 The Story of Rimini, 100, 108–9, 169n.60 on Wordsworth, 33–4, 148–9 see also Cockney School; Examiner Hurd, Richard, 28 Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 164n.5 Hutcheson, Francis, 50, 126, 146, 151, 158 on aesthetics, 124 on beauty, 124, 144, 147 on benevolence, 124, 144
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An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 124 on the moral sense, 126, 136, 144, 147 on sensations, 123–4 A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, 124 ‘Hymn to Pan’ (Keats), 47, 48, 56, 152 Hyperion: A Fragment (Keats), 3, 7, 14, 15, 49, 64, 65–96, 112, 113, 121, 122–3, 132, 136, 137, 139, 142, 143, 153, 157, 177n.41 I stood tip-toe upon a little hill (Keats), 14, 27, 35–8, 64 Idea of a Patriot King, The (Bolingbroke), 25, 102 Idealism, 2, 61, 123–4, 143, 158 identity, 81–3 ignobility, 79, 95 illusion, 60–3, 118, 136–7, 148–9 imagination in A Defence of Poetry, 144–5, 146, 147 and philosophy, 116 in Smith’s moral theory, 126, 147 see also Keats (John) Immortality Ode (Wordsworth), 128 imperialism, 4, 31, 68 Incas see Marmontel; Native Americans Incas: Or, The Destruction of the Empire of Peru, The (Marmontel), 68, 95, 176n.19 India, 108 Indicator (Hunt), 182n.9 individualism, 3, 49–50, 54, 72, 110, 115 industrialisation, 107–8 industrialism, 15 influence, 12, 27, 151 innatism, 124 Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, An (Hutcheson), 124 Ireland, 26, 60, 135 irony, 5, 92, 95 Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil (Keats), 14, 15, 60, 61, 97, 99–100, 104–10, 112, 116, 120, 152, 153 Jansenism, 73 Jaucaourt, Louis de, 134 Java, 108 Jefferson, Thomas, 77 Notes on the State of Virginia, 79 Jeffrey, Francis, 58
on the British landscape, 37–8 on contemporary poetry, 36 on the French School, 29 on manners, 38 on the national school, of poetry, 29, 31 see also Edinburgh Review Joan of Arc, 20 John Keats and Romantic Medicine (Almeida), 179n.59 Johnson, Samuel Lives of the English Poets, 17, 22 Jones, Jack, 157 Jones, James, 82 Kamchatka, 177n.33 Kames, Lord see Home, Henry Kant, Immanuel, 11, 34 Keach, William, 31 Keats, George, 25, 61, 65, 66, 71, 132 emigration of, 66 Keats, Georgiana Augusta Wylie, 25, 61, 65, 71, 132 Keats, John on Adam’s dream, 62, 87, 126 on allegory, life as, 151 on America, 65, 66, 71–2 and ancients/moderns, 18–20 and anti–intellectualism, 11, 130–1 and approaches to his poetry, 8–12, 15, 38, 39, 48 on associationism, 127 and attacks on, by reviewers, 11 and axioms, in philosophy, 130 and axioms, of poetry, 127 and ‘anxiety of influence’, 26–7, 167n.41 on beauty, 53, 126, 127, 147, 158 on beauty/truth dialectic, 124, 126–7, 144, 147, 148 belatedness of, 38 on book-learning, 128–30, 155 ‘burden of the mystery’, 132 ‘burden of the past’, 14 ‘cameleon’ poet, 122, 150, 190n.68 on Carlile, 26 ‘Chamber of Maiden-Thought’, 53, 62, 75 on the Chinese, 77 on Christianity, 4, 140–2 on ‘Circumstance’, 131 ‘cliff of Poesy’, 26 ‘consequitive reasoning’, 4, 7, 11, 46 on custom, 128 on ‘disinterestedness’, 82, 131–2
Index on dreams, 131 on egotism, 19 on the Elizabethans, 2, 8, 18–19, 22, 43 empiricism of, 130, 140, 155, 158 on English cultural authority, 71–2 on the English language, 30 and the Enlightenment, 7–9, 12–13, 14–16 escapism of, 8–12, 48–9, 149–50, 154 finances of, 99 on French corruption, 30 on genius, 14, 22 on Godwin, 7, 46, 71–2 ‘grand democracy’, 52 ‘grand march of intellect’, 22 on great men, 21 on ‘great Poets’, 19, 38 and Hazlitt, 3, 11, 105, 165n.9 ‘holinesss of the Heart’s affections’, 126 on human nature, 72–5 humanism of, 8, 14, 41–2, 121, 142–3, 147–8, 169n.61 on identity, 82, 141 on imagination, 19, 48 , 62, 92, 126–7, 131, 147, 155 on indolence, 128–9, 131 ‘infant chamber’, 84, 137 on instinct, 74–5, 132 on intellectual development, 10, 19–20, 21–2, 151 on intensity, 127 on ‘inter-assimulation’, 49, 132 on intuition, 11, 147 on knowledge, 11, 128–9, 155, 188n.25 on landscape, 19, 36, 37–8 library of, 11, 12 ‘Life of Sensations’, 123 literary imperialism of, 85–6 on ‘literary kings’, 46 on ‘Mammon’, 122 ‘Mansion of Many Apartments’, 3, 34, 53–4, 62, 72, 75 medical training of, 11, 15, 65, 109, 163n.49 ‘Men of Genius’/‘Men of Power’, 72, 82, 131 ‘meridian Line’, 19–20 metaphysical speculations of, 11 on Milton, 3, 19–20, 21, 22, 43, 54, 71, 88, 89, 96, 137 on mist, 129, 130 on money, 72, 98–9
215
on moral philosophy, 11, 15, 46, 92, 122–4 ‘negative capability’, 19, 82, 129, 139 on originality, 128 ‘palpable design’, 34 on passivity, 5, 60, 127–9, 130–2 on pedagogy, 128–31 on perfectibility, 71–2, 74, 141–2, 153 pessimism of, 26, 74, 140–1 on philosophy, 11, 117–20, 147–8 ‘pious frauds of religion’, 60 ‘Pleasure Thermometer’, 48, 49 on the poet, 3, 15, 82, 121, 132–3, 136–43, 147–8, 149 on poetry, 19, 121, 147, 148–9 on politics, 25–6, 32–3 on progress, 22, 25–6, 53–4, 63–4, 72–3, 75, 79–80, 87–8, 121 on purpose, 132 reading of, 8–9, 11–13, 66 on reason, 11, 46 reception of, 8–12 on the Reformation, 21–2, 23 on representative men, 20–1 republicanism of, 14, 15, 52 reviews of, 32, 39, 169n.4 on salvation, system of, 141–2 scepticism of, 8–9, 15, 22, 71, 74, 130, 158 on Scott, 45–6 on sculpture, 92, 142, 143 ‘second consciousness’, 131, 188n.27 ‘self concentration’, 122 on sensations, 11, 61, 124 sentimentalism of, 15, 39, 46–7, 92–6 on sleep, 62, 131 snobbery towards, 11, 163n.45 on sorrow, 41–2, 49, 56, 63, 91–3 on soul/‘Soul-making’, 53–4, 63, 140–2 on spatial magnitude, 19, 37, 137 on speculation see metaphysical speculations ‘spiritual yeast’, 131–2 staged progress of, 10, 14, 53–4, 151 on the state of nature, 73–5 on the state of society, 26 on suffering, 41–2, 49, 56, 63, 65, 73–5, 140–1 on superstition, 22, 25, 60–1, 121 on sympathy, 54, 56, 91, 92, 122–3, 132, 137, 139 on truth, 11, 46, 48, 126 on walking tour, of Scotland and Ireland, 26, 177n.41, 180n.96
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on Wordsworth, 3, 18–20, 21, 22, 26, 35, 43, 54, 128–9, 165n.13 poems of Calidore: A Fragment, 39, 41, 42 Endymion, 3, 14, 15, 19, 27, 42, 46, 47–56, 57, 63–4, 123, 132, 141, 152 The Eve of St. Agnes, 14, 15, 41, 47, 56–64, 109, 110, 113, 152, 154 The Eve of St. Mark, 60 The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, 3, 14, 15, 35, 64, 65, 66, 96, 89, 109, 112, 121–50, 151, 153 ‘Hymn to Pan’, 47, 48, 56, 152 Hyperion: A Fragment, 3, 7, 14, 15, 49, 64, 65–96, 112, 113, 121, 122–3, 132, 136, 137, 139, 142, 143, 153, 157, 177n.41 I stood tip-toe upon a little hill, 14, 27, 35–8, 64 Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil, 14, 15, 60, 61, 97, 99–100, 104–10, 112, 116, 120, 152, 153 Lamia, 14, 15, 99–100, 104, 110–20, 153 Lines on the Mermaid Tavern, 98 Lines Written on 29 May, 33 O Solitude, 37 Ode on a Grecian Urn, 14, 124, 147, 156–8 Ode on Indolence, 156–7 Ode to a Nightingale, 35 Ode to Psyche, 14, 154–8 Old Meg, 58 On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, 35, 66, 85–6, 91 On Seeing the Elgin Marbles, 35 Poems (1817), 14, 21, 27, 41, 42, 58 Robin Hood, 98–9 Sleep and Poetry, 14, 27, 28, 31–5, 37, 38, 39, 62, 64, 98, 151 Specimen of an Induction, 39, 40 To Autumn, 10 To Charles Cowden Clarke, 40 To George Felton Mathew, 37 To Hope, 33 To one who has been long in city pent, 37 Woman! when I behold thee, 39 Keats, Tom, 26, 60 Keats’s Life of Allegory (Levinson), 169n.60, 186n.67 Kosciusko, Andrew Thaddeus Bonaventure, 32
Kucich, Greg, 11, 27, 32, 39, 95, 137 Lafitau, Joseph–François Mœurs des sauvages amériquains, 76 Lake Poets, 33–4, 39 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier d’, 177n.33 Lamia (Keats), 14, 15, 99–100, 104, 110–20, 153 lamiae, myth of, 112–13 landscape gardens, 156 language, theories of see glottogenesis las Casas, Bartolomé de see Casas le Clerc, Georges Louis see Buffon ‘Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth’ (Hazlitt), 29–30 Lectures on the English Comic Writers (Hazlitt), 168n.49 Lectures on the English Poets (Hazlitt), 2, 18, 36, 92, 98, 105–6, 143 Lectures on Jurisprudence (Smith), 103, 134 Lectures on Rhetoric (Blair), 27, 90, 91 Lectures on Rhetoric (Smith), 90–1 Letter to William Gifford, A (Hazlitt), 92 Letters on Chivalry and Romance (Hurd), 164n.5 Letters from Illinois (Birkbeck), 66, 70 Levinson, Marjorie, 14, 35, 57, 89, 99, 110, 119 Keats’s Life of Allegory, 169n.60, 186n.67 Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Godwin), 44, 45, 46 Lines on the Mermaid Tavern (Keats), 98 Lines Written on 29 May (Keats), 33 literary history see Blair; Hazlitt; history (literary); Hume; Hunt (Leigh); Jeffrey; Smith Lives (Plutarch), 113, 114 Lives of the English Poets, The (Johnson), 17, 22 Livingston, Donald, 118 Livius, Titus (Livy), 11, 102, 111, 114 The History of Rome, 113, 114 Locke, John, 5, 13, 50, 154, 155 on association, 124, 131 on education, 129–30 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 124, 130, 155 Keats’s reading of, 129, 151 Of the Conduct of the Understanding, 129, 130, 188n.25 on reading, 130
Index Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 130 Two Treatises of Government, 67 on visual phenomena, 130, 155, 190n.5 Lockhart, John Gibson, 37 Louis XIV, 21, 65, 73–4, 83, 93 Louis XVIII, 52 Luther, Martin, 23 luxury, 15, 100, 103–4, 110–11, 113–20, 153, 183n.23 of the poor, 107 positive and negative forms of, 119 and women, 114 see also Examiner McGann, Jerome, 6, 9, 10 Machiavelli, Niccolò di Bernardo dei, 102 Mackintosh, James, 2 Macpherson, James see Ossian Magritte, Peter, 87 Mahomet II, 21 Maillet, Benoit de, 80 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 101 An Essay on the Principle of Population, 99 Mandeville, Bernard de, 125 Mandeville (Godwin), 170n.20 Manfred (Byron), 170n.15 manners in America, 70–1 British observation of American, 70–2 history of, 14, 20, 24, 27–8, 30, 38, 45, 103, 143, 151, 152 and poetry, 28–30, 31–2 and state of society, 26 see also vitality Marmontel, Jean-François The Incas: Or, The Destruction of the Empire of Peru, 68, 95 Keats’s reading of, 176n.19 Marvell, Andrew, 33 Mary, Queen of Scots, 94 materialism, 74, 177n.34 Mavor, William Fordyce on Columbus, 86–7 on the Egyptians, 80 on feudalism, 60 Historical Account of the Most Celebrated Voyages, 86, 87, 95 Keats’s reading of, 8, 12, 151, 179n.73 on South America, 87, 95 Universal History, 17, 80 May Day, 112 mechanism, 4, 124–5, 127, 146, 154
217
Medici, Lorenzo de, 103, 106 medieval see Middle Ages Mee, Jon, 127 Merrilies, Meg, 173n.55 mesmerism, 4 Metahistory (White), 5 Mexico, 68, 95 Middle Ages, the, 23–4, 45, 57–60, 152, 173n.59 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 105 Millar, John, 50, 67, 68 millennianism, 142 Milton, John, 29, 33, 46, 71, 72, 74, 137 and Keats, 3, 19–20, 21, 22, 43, 54, 71, 88, 89, 96, 137 Paradise Lost, 30, 113, 122, 184n.33 and representativeness, 19–21 mining, 69, 177n.30, 181n.111, 184n.33 Mœurs des sauvages amériquains (Lafitau), 76 monetary policy, 101–2 see also political economy monotheism, 72, 134–5 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, 72, 151 on climatic determinism, 76–7 De l’Esprit des lois, 76–7, 84 on feudalism, 84 Moore, Thomas, 10 moral philosophy, 8, 11, 12, 13, 15, 44, 46, 66, 97, 99, 122, 123–32, 136, 144–5, 150, 154 see also Keats (John) moral sense, philosophy of see common sense moral sentiment see sentiment; sympathy Morales, Francisco de Palmerin of England, 41–2, 52 see also Southey Morte D’Arthur (Southey), 2 Muir, Kenneth, 82, 138 mythology, 13, 47, 49, 76, 92, 114, 122 see also lamiae narrative, 57 narrative history see history (narrative) Napoleonic wars, 30–1, 40, 71 national identity, 27, 29–31 national school, of poetry, 28–31, 34, 98 nationalism, 31 Native Americans, 7, 67–8, 69, 73, 75–6, 77, 79, 81, 82, 83, 93, 94, 95 see also Marmontel; Mexico; Peru
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Natural History of Religion, The (Hume), 1, 134, 148 natural law, 68, 72, 79, 112, 113 natural philosophy, 74 natural religion see deism; history (religious) Natural Supernaturalism (Abrams), 160n.6 necessity, 74, 78, 88, 132, 153 neoclassicism, 3, 19, 30 neo-Harringtonians, 15, 102, 103 neo-Platonism, 48 Neveu de Rameau, Le (Diderot), 76 New Historicism, 9 New World, 30, 69, 70, 84, 87, 91, 95, 96 Newey, Vincent, 28, 33, 49, 108, 169n.61 Newtonianism, 24, 155 noble savage, 76, 153 see also ignobility North America see America Notes on a Journey in America (Birkbeck), 70 Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson), 79 O Solitude (Keats), 37 O’Brien, Karen, 5, 68, 92 Observations on the effect of the Manufacturing System (Owen), 102–3 Observations on Man (Hartley), 125 Observations on the River Wye (Gilpin), 59 Ode on a Grecian Urn (Keats), 14, 124, 147, 154 156–8 Ode on Indolence (Keats), 156–7 Ode to a Nightingale (Keats), 35 Ode to Psyche (Keats), 14, 154–8 Of the Conduct of the Understanding (Locke), 129, 130, 188n.25 ‘Of History and Romance’ (Godwin), 44–5 Old Cumberland Beggar, The (Wordsworth), 132 Old Meg (Keats), 58 ‘old school’, of poetry, 18, 28, 30, 36, 98, 106 Old World, 70, 77 Olympians, 66, 75, 78, 79, 84, 85–91, 94, 96, 112, 149 ‘On Burns and the Old English Ballads’ (Hazlitt), 98 ‘On Chaucer and Spenser’ (Hazlitt),
105–6 ‘On Dreams’ (Hazlitt), 61, 62, 131 ‘On the English Novelists’ (Hazlitt), 43, 46 On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer (Keats), 35, 66, 85–6, 91 ‘On Imitation’ (Hazlitt), 124, 127 ‘On the Living Poets’ (Hazlitt), 36 ‘On Manner’ (Hazlitt), 77 ‘On Milton’s Versification’ (Hazlitt), 28–9 ‘On Poetry in General’ (Hazlitt), 92, 143, 157–8 On Seeing the Elgin Marbles (Keats), 35 ‘On the Tendency of Sects’ (Hazlitt), 26, 119 O’Neill, Michael, 46, 88, 89, 122, 189n.44 opinion see public opinion oral culture, 133 origins theory, 76–7 see also Buffon; Robertson (William) Ossian, 1, 91, 177n.41 Ovid, 74 Owen, Robert, 102, 142 Observations on the effect of the Manufacturing System, 102–3 Oxford, 123, 124 Paine, Thomas The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance, 101 Palmerin of England (Morales and Southey), 41–2, 52 pantheism, 134 Paradise Lost (Milton), 30, 113, 122, 184n.33 parliamentary reform see reform party spirit see sectarianism patriotism, 30–1 Pauw, Cornelius Franciscus de, 77 Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, 76 Peacock, Thomas Love, 2, 3 The Four Ages of Poetry, 36, 84, 133, 143 pedagogy, 5, 128–31, 188n.25 Pentridge uprising, 9 perfectibility, 55, 71–2, 74, 99, 141–2, 153 periodicals, 169n.68 see also Edinburgh Review; Examiner; Indicator periodicity, 6–8, 13, 161n.32, 164n.57 Peru, 68, 95
Index Peterloo massacre, 9, 25 Petzelians, 140 Philip II, of Macedon, 20 Phillips, Mark Salber, 5, 27, 156 philosophic history see history (philosophic) Philosophical View of Reform, A (Shelley), 143, 146, 176n.25 Philosophie de l’histoire, La (Voltaire), 66, 68, 72, 74, 76, 80, 134 philosophy, 117–18 see also Keats (John); moral philosophy; natural philosophy Phoenicians, the, 80 picturesque, 35, 59, 85 Pittock, Murray, 8 Pizarro, Francisco González, 1st Marqués de los Atabillos, 65, 79, 95 Plain Speaker, The (Hazlitt), 61 Plato, 141, 144 The Republic, 117 Platonism, 126 see also neo-Platonism Plutarch, 111 Lives, 113, 114 Pocock, John, 3 Poems (1817) (Keats), 14, 21, 27, 41, 42, 58 political economy, 12, 97–8, 99–100, 101–2, 107–8 see also monetary policy political representation see reform political science, 97 Polybius, 102 polytheism, 134–5 Poor Laws, 107 Pope, Alexander, 17, 26, 28, 31 popery, 135 Popish Plot, the, 135 Porter, Roy, 3, 4, 5, 13 Price, Richard, 74, 142 Priestley, Joseph, 5, 74, 142 The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity, 74 primitive encounter, 15, 66, 79 primitivism, 3, 30, 36, 91, 133, 135–6, 153 private sphere, 56–7, 104–5 privatisation, 109–10, 120 progress, 4, 5, 22, 25–6, 54–5, 63–4, 66, 67–8, 75, 95–6, 133 Progress of Poesy, The (Gray), 28 prophesy, 62, 126 Protestantism, 21
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providentialism, 68, 74 psychic projection, 123, 132 psychology, 124–7, 156 public opinion, 33 quest-romance, 42, 47 Quietism, 73 Raleigh, Walter, 11 rationalism, 11, 46, 51, 53, 123–4, 128–9, 145, 147, 154 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François, 77 reason, 4, 6, 46, 118 Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains (Pauw), 76 Recollections of Writers (Cowden Clarke), 11 refinement, 1, 3, 15, 17, 18, 23, 29, 40, 47, 64, 85, 133, 134, 142 reform, 32–3, 39 Reformation, the, 20, 21–2, 23, 24, 30, 135, 166n.28 Reid, Thomas, 123 relativism, 22 religion see Christianity; history (religious); Keats (John); natural philosophy; salvation Religion of the Heart, The (Hunt), 141 Reply to Malthus, A (Hazlitt), 101 representativeness see history (representative); Keats (John) Republic, The (Plato), 117 republicanism, 14, 15, 52 Restoration, the, 18, 30, 31, 75 Restoration poets, 28, 29, 38 reverie, 56, 61–2, 64, 154, 156–8 revolution in Keats, 78–80 see also American revolution; French revolution Reynolds, John Hamilton, 18, 19, 21, 23, 34, 43, 49, 52, 53, 56, 64, 72, 75, 88, 128, 131 rhetoric, 78, 92, 113, 142 Ricardo, David, 101 Robertson, Fiona, 86–7 Robertson, John, 4 Robertson, William, 11, 28, 38, 92 and attitude to the Americas, 68 on causation on chivalry/the crusades, 40, 60 on climatic theories, 77 on Columbus, 86–7 on degeneracy theories, 77
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on developmental narratives, 22–3, 25, 26, 47, 66, 154 empiricism of, 24 on feudalism, 22–3, 47, 49, 60, 83, 152 The History of America, 7, 54, 65–6, 68, 69, 73, 75–7, 79, 81–4, 86–7, 93, 94, 95–6, 108, 135 The History of Charles V, 21, 22–3, 25, 40, 59, 103, 106, 111, 113, 115 The History of [North] America, 66, 68, 95–6 The History of Scotland, 22, 59, 94, 135 Keats’s reading of, 8, 12, 21, 65–6, 151 on luxury, 103, 115 on narrative, 68 on Native Americans, 7, 76, 79, 81, 82, 83, 94, 95 on origins theories, 76 and philosophic history, 24 on primitive encounter, 79 on progress, 22–3, 26, 67, 73, 95–6, 135 on providentialism, 68 on the Reformation, 23, 166n.28 on Rome, 59 sentimentalism of, 5, 7, 92, 93, 94, 95–6 on the silk trade, 113 on South America, 77, 84, 94–5 on Spanish colonisation, 69–70, 73, 87, 94, 95, 108 on stadial theory, 67–8, 70, 94 Robin Hood, 98–9 Robin Hood (Keats), 98–9 ‘Robin Hood’ poems (Hunt), 182n.9 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 129 Roe, Nicholas, 9, 32, 108 Rogers, Samuel, 2 Roman Empire see empire (Roman) Roman History, The (Hooke), 111 Roman Revolutions, The (Vertot), 111, 115 romance, 104, 110 difference from history, 44–6 Godwin on, 44–5 Hazlitt on, 43–4, 46 Scott on, 2, 45 see also Eve of St. Agnes, The; Isabella Romanticism, 3, 4, 6–7 and ‘anxiety of influence’, 28, 38, 167n.41, 167–8n.45 and attitudes to the Enlightenment, 4–8 escapism of, 8–9
and history, 9, 152 Irish, 6 materialist approaches to, 9, 10 psychological approaches to, 10, 14, 27, 28, 38 and Romantic ideology, 6–7 Scottish, 6 self-representation of, 6–7 socio-stylistic approaches to, 10 see also historicism; New Historicism; periodicity Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (Butler), 190n.69 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 105 Round Table, The (Hazlitt and Hunt), 40, 77, 119 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 36, 50, 77 on education, 129 Émile, 129 Keats’s reading of, 13, 151 rudeness, 3, 15, 17, 40, 47 ruins, 59–60, 173n.59 Ruins, The (Volney), 54–5, 139, 141, 177n.34 rupture/recovery narratives, 30–1, 34, 38 Ryan, Robert, 13, 47, 123, 124, 138, 141 Saint Bartholomew Day massacre, 24, 135 St. Jerome, 95 St. Leon (Godwin), 43, 49 salvation, 139, 141–2 savages, 121, 132–3, 134, 135, 136, 143 see also barbarism; ignobility; noble savage ‘Sceptic, The’ (Hume), 117–18 scepticism, 4, 8–9, 13, 15, 22, 71, 74, 134, 151, 154, 158 see also Keats (John) Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, 34 science, of man, 3, 7, 13, 15 Scotch novels (Scott), 45, 46 Scotland, 26, 60, 135 Scott, John The Arabian Nights, 115 Scott, Thomas The Table of Cebes, 156 Scott, Walter, 2, 10, 28, 29, 46 The Antiquary, 170n.20 ‘Essay on Chivalry’, 45 ‘Essay on Drama’, 45 ‘Essay on Romance’, 2, 45 Guy Mannering, 170n.20, 173n.55
Index and Hazlitt, 43–4 The Heart of Midlothian, 170n.20 and Keats, 45–6 The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 58 on manners, 45 on representativeness, 20 on romance, 45 and Smollett, 45–6 Scottish Enlightenment see Enlightenment sectarianism, 26, 167n.39, 73, 119, 154, 167n.39 Selden, John Titles of Honor, 166n.26 sensations, 11, 61, 123–4, 155 see also Keats (John) sensibility, 2 sentimentalism, 5, 7, 8, 15, 92–4 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of, 123, 146 Shakespeare, William, 18, 29, 30, 33, 37, 105–6 Hamlet, 105 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 105 Romeo and Juliet, 105 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 2, 120, 147 Adonais, 9 Alastor, 49 on beauty, 147 The Cenci, 122 A Defence of Poetry, 122, 123, 143–7, 149, 150, 186n.75, 189n.60 on ethics, 144 on the imagination, 144–5, 146, 147 on the mirror trope, 147, 148, 190n.65 on moral philosophy, 123, 144–5 A Philosophical View of Reform, 143, 146, 176n.25 on poets as legislators, 144 on reality, 147 and representativeness, 20 on sympathetic identification, 123, 144–5 on utility, 4, 144–6 on volition, 150 Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, A (Hutcheson), 124 Sidney, Algernon, 21, 33, 71, 72 Sidney, Philip, 71 Siècle de Louis XIV, Le (Voltaire), 20–1, 24, 25, 26, 65, 73–4, 79, 83, 93 silk trade, 113, 185n.52 sincerity, 106, 120 Siskin, Clifford, 6, 8, 161n.32 Sketches of America (Fearon), 70–1
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Sketches of the History of Man (Kames), 183n.24 slavery, 108 sleep, 61–2, 131 Sleep and Poetry (Keats), 14, 27, 28, 31–5, 37, 38, 39, 62, 64, 98, 151 Smith, Adam, 2, 133, 136, 144–5, 147, 151 on affection, 53 on asceticism, 120 on beauty, 64, 145–6, 147 on civic virtue, 97 on civility, 138–9 on commerce, 97 on division of labour, 97 on friendship, 51, 53 on imagination, 126, 147 on the impartial observer, 123, 126, 138 Keats’s reading of, 12 Lectures on Jurisprudence, 103, 134 Lectures on Rhetoric, 90–1 on literary history, 90–1 on luxury, 103 on moral education, 136 on the moral sense, 126, 136 on poetic evolution, 90–1 on socialisation, 50–1 on stadial theory, 67–8 on sympathetic identification, 51, 123, 125–6, 144–5 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 2, 12, 51, 53, 120, 123, 125–6, 136, 138–9, 145–6 on utility, 145–6 Wealth of Nations, 97, 103, 153, 176n.21, 183n.23 Smollett, Tobias George, 45–6 sociability, 39, 49, 98–9, 106, 108, 112, 120 social contract, 50–1, 172n.41 socialisation theories, 42, 47, 49, 50–1, 53, 56, 63 sociology, 2, 13, 15, 17, 18, 45, 47, 50, 54, 57, 63, 72, 133, 136, 143, 151–2, 153, 154, 158 Socrates, 74, 117 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke), 130 sophism, 180n.81 sophrosyne, 117 soul see Keats (John) Southey, Robert, 3, 142 Morte D’Arthur, 2
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John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment
Palmerin of England, 41–2, 52 Spadafora, David, 5, 12 Specimen of an Induction (Keats), 39, 40 Spectator, The, 156 Spence, Joseph, 28 Spenser, Edmund, 18, 29, 74, 105 The Faerie Queene, 41, 42, 52 sentimentalism of, 41 Sperry, Stuart, 7, 8–9 spirit of the age see history (representative) Spirit of the Age, The (Hazlitt), 20, 21, 22 state of the nation see Carlyle; ‘Condition of England’ stadial history see history (stadial) state of nature, 50, 73–5 state of society, 26 Steele, Richard, 33 Stillinger, Jack, 147, 148, 155 The Hoodwinking of Madeline, 163n.46 Story of Rimini, The (Hunt), 100, 108–9, 169n.60 superstition, 15, 40, 60–1, 109, 121, 134, 135 see also Keats (John) Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (Diderot), 76 Surrey Institute, 65 Swift, Jonathan, 29 Sydney, Algernon see Sidney (Algernon) Sydney, Philip see Sidney (Philip) sympathetic identification, 8, 61–2, 91–4, 122–3, 125–6, 132, 136, 137, 144–5 and Enlightenment historians, 5, 7 and Keats, 7, 15, 56, 91 see also Theory of Moral Sentiments, The system, 6, 101 Table of Cebes, The (Scott), 156 Tales of the East (Weber), 115 Tasso, Torquato, 28 Tatler, The, 156 Taylor, John, 48, 127 Tell, William, 21 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Smith), 2, 12, 51, 53, 120, 123, 125–6, 136, 138–9, 145–6 Thomson, Herbert, 145 Times, The, 39 Tintern Abbey (Wordsworth), 34 Titans, 15, 66, 75–6, 78–85, 87–8, 89, 90, 92–3, 94, 96, 112, 136, 137, 138,
139, 142, 149 Titles of Honor (Selden), 166n.26 To Autumn (Keats), 10 To Charles Cowden Clarke (Keats), 40 To George Felton Mathew (Keats), 37 To Hope (Keats), 33 To one who has been long in city pent (Keats), 37 topography, 19, 36, 37–8 devices of, 156–7 poetry of, 35, 169n.60 totalitarianism, 4 tragedy, 15, 21, 93–4, 190n.65 transfer, of ideas, 6–7, 12 translatio imperii, 71 Treatise of Human Nature, A (Hume), 118, 148 Troilus and Cressida (Chaucer), 105 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune, 72 Two Treatises of Government (Locke), 67 Ulysses, 43 uneven development, 67, 68, 153 uniformity, 25, 67–8, 72–3, 151–2 universal history see history (universal) Universal History (Mavor), 17, 80 utilitarianism see utility utility, 4, 46, 98, 109, 123, 145–7, 148, 153, 154, 176n.25 see also Bentham; Shelley; Smith Vanbrugh, John, 37 Vane, Henry, 21 Vendler, Helen, 155, 157 Vertot, René Aubert, abbé de Roman Revolutions, 111, 115 vitalism, 78–9, 153 vitality, 17, 28, 30, 31, 34, 36, 38, 91, 133, 143 Voconian law, the, 114 Volney, Constantin François de Chassebœuf, Comte de, 47 The Ruins, 54–5, 139, 141, 177n.34 Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet de, 121, 141 on anecdotal history, 21 on barbarism, 68 on chivalry/the crusades, 40, 135 on climatic determinism, 76 deism of, 22, 47, 134, 141 on developmental narratives, 23–4, 25, 26, 53–6, 72–5 Dictionnaire philosophique, 15, 22, 24,
Index 25, 26, 104, 119, 155, 167n.39, 181n.112, 188n.29 on the Egyptians, 80 empiricism of, 24 Essai sur les mœurs, 21, 23–4, 25–6, 65, 66, 68, 73–4, 75, 83, 95, 135, 176n.28 on feudalism, 23–4, 47, 60, 83 Keats’s reading of, 8, 11, 12, 13, 20, 21, 65, 128, 151 on luxury, 104, 119 on philosophic history, 24 La Philosophie de l’histoire, 66, 68, 72, 74, 76, 80, 134 on progress, 23–4, 26, 67, 72, 135 on the Reformation, 24 on representativeness, 20–1 scepticism of, 8–9, 15, 74 on sectarianism, 26, 73 on sensations, 155 sentimentalism of, 92, 93 Le Siècle de Louis XIV, 20–1, 24, 25, 26, 65, 73–4, 79, 83, 93 on Spanish America, 24, 95, 135 on superstition, 25, 135 on tragedy, 21, 93 on uniformity, 72–3 Walker, William, 5 Wallace, William, 21 Walpole, Robert, 103 Ward, Aileen, 21 Warton, Joseph An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 28 Warton, Thomas, 151 on chivalry/the crusades, 40, 60 The History of English Poetry, 12, 17–18, 27, 29, 30, 40, 45
223
Keats’s reading of, 12, 28 on manners, 28, 30, 31, 38 Washington, George, 71, 72 Watkins, Daniel, 10, 47, 52, 57, 109, 110 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 97, 103, 153, 176n.21, 183n.23 Weber, Henry Tales of the East, 115 Whig history see history White, Hayden Metahistory, 5 ‘Why the Arts are not Progressive’ (Hazlitt), 18 Wolfson, Susan, 113, 122, 155–6 Woman! when I behold thee (Keats), 39 Womersley, David, 5, 7 Woodhouse, Richard, 190n.68 Wordsworth, William, 2, 4, 10, 64, 88, 142, 149 on education, 128–9 egotism of, 22, 98, 149 The Excursion, 149, 190n.69 Expostulation and Reply, 129 genius of, 19–20, 22 and Hunt, 33–4 Immortality Ode, 128 insularity of, 98, 148–9 and Keats, 3, 18–20, 21, 22, 26, 35, 43, 54, 128–9 as a ‘modern’ poet, 18–19 The Old Cumberland Beggar, 132 and passivity, 129 representativeness of, 18–20, 21 subjectivity of, 19–20, 43, 122, 132, 154 Tintern Abbey, 34 Wycherley, William, 37 Xenophon, 11
